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I asked at the end of November about the usage of "blond" and "blonde". The Blond versus The Blonde
I was intrigued because![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nialla42 made a whole post about blond(e) and brunet(te), with specific rules about usage--and they were simply different from the rules I'd learned. You can read her post and the comments; she actually got many more comments than I did in my post (complete with poll).
It appears from a completely unscientific study that more people learned the gender rule (blond for male, blonde for female) than learned the adjective rule (blond is adj., blonde is noun). Most people don't use the spelling "brunet" at all and prefer "brown-haired" to describe men though they might use "brunette" for women. I can't really identify any geographical or age link, except that the few people who learned the adjective versus noun instead of the gender rule are from the US and seem to have be roughly (give or take five to ten years) my age (Michael Shanks and John Barrowman are in this age group, and that's all y'all need to know).
I've been teaching History of the English Language for years. It requires a completely different way of thinking about grammar and usage than I generally use as a literature and language professor (Old and Middle English are languages, and hey, I occasionally teach Latin too). In HEL, as it is fondly known, we describe how people use language instead of prescribing how people should use it. With that approach, I was fascinated to learn that there are at least two entirely self-coherent, entirely different rules for usage for blond/blonde (and brunet, which I never use either, versus brunette, which . . . I never actually use either).
From a writing approach, of course, I was completely horrified to learn that my rule seems to be the minority rule. People might think I'm doin it rong! (LOL is a dialect rather than a language, by the way; LOL as I see it is a dialect of English. My mother, who taught English and is one of the most correct writers I know, keeps surprising me by throwing bits of LOL into her otherwise highly literate e-mails to me.) I now realize too that occasionally I've seen other people's writing and muttered, "Well, that's wrong" when it isn't; it's just a different set of rules.
So I have no decisive or incisive conclusions. I just thank everyone who played along with the poll, and I'm sorry I didn't even manage to pull this post together in less than three weeks. Don't be too harsh on those of us who learned a different rule--but please, keep beating up on people who can't use apostrophes. That one drives me nuts.
Userpics and fandomsThanks to everyone who recommended GIMP. Brilliant Husband made my Monk icon (the one you see here) with OpenOffice, and it was when I tried to install OpenOffice that my previous laptop went belly-up. Well, actually, it was the step before that, when I tried to get X11 so that I could install OpenOffice, but that's getting into a long story that I prefer to forget. I may try GIMP. I probably will try OpenOffice. The computer disaster, however, ate huge chunks out of my time, and I'm still recovering both from the temporal costs and the psychic ones. I will try to make some new icons . . . probably sometime next year. I so need Emerson Cod and Itty Bitty from Pushing Daisies! And I still need a Teyla icon! And Bill Lee! And . . . and . . . and. . . .
In other news, as I may have mentioned, I've fallen down the rabbit hole and am writing a fixit that starts with the last few minutes of Primeval 2.07. If anyone would like to volunteer to beta, please let me know; my usual betas don't watch, I think (and are probably cursing me under their breaths for diverting my time to yet another show). It will be a while before I need a beta, I think. I will warn you in advance: it swings wildly from heavy angst to verging-on-crack humor, with way too much dialogue and far too little action. But hey: the show writers left me with a such a mess to clean up that there has to be a lot of talking, and most of these people aren't particularly good at talking, as we few, we cracky few who watched and discussed the show here know.
I do still have my SG-1 plot bunny folder and the start of a season 9 story that I put aside partly because I had enough plot for a novel and didn't know when I could write it, and partly because I then decided maybe it should be set in season 10 so that I could get Vala in it. I even have scraps of an Unas story that I abandoned because I had no earthly idea what to do with it. I will write more SG-1, I promise, and quite possibly more SGA (if only because the paid writers don't give us enough Carson!).
SGA: 'Identity' (spoilers)
Haven't we seen this before? Wasn't it more interesting last time we saw it? I figured out it was the Ancient Communications Device pretty darned quickly. I failed to feel any concern for Jennifer not because I don't like her (I do) but because I couldn't believe she was in any actual danger. I couldn't care about Evil Woman (whose name I have already forgotten) because she was a cold-blooded killer. No, I was far more concerned for Radek! I don't like it when they write Rodney as completely unconcerned about Radek. He was worried when he first heard about the stabbing, but the ending of the episode really ticked me off! And we didn't get enough Carson!
Sorry--I didn't even realize I was this annoyed.
I was intrigued because
nialla42 made a whole post about blond(e) and brunet(te), with specific rules about usage--and they were simply different from the rules I'd learned. You can read her post and the comments; she actually got many more comments than I did in my post (complete with poll).It appears from a completely unscientific study that more people learned the gender rule (blond for male, blonde for female) than learned the adjective rule (blond is adj., blonde is noun). Most people don't use the spelling "brunet" at all and prefer "brown-haired" to describe men though they might use "brunette" for women. I can't really identify any geographical or age link, except that the few people who learned the adjective versus noun instead of the gender rule are from the US and seem to have be roughly (give or take five to ten years) my age (Michael Shanks and John Barrowman are in this age group, and that's all y'all need to know).
I've been teaching History of the English Language for years. It requires a completely different way of thinking about grammar and usage than I generally use as a literature and language professor (Old and Middle English are languages, and hey, I occasionally teach Latin too). In HEL, as it is fondly known, we describe how people use language instead of prescribing how people should use it. With that approach, I was fascinated to learn that there are at least two entirely self-coherent, entirely different rules for usage for blond/blonde (and brunet, which I never use either, versus brunette, which . . . I never actually use either).
From a writing approach, of course, I was completely horrified to learn that my rule seems to be the minority rule. People might think I'm doin it rong! (LOL is a dialect rather than a language, by the way; LOL as I see it is a dialect of English. My mother, who taught English and is one of the most correct writers I know, keeps surprising me by throwing bits of LOL into her otherwise highly literate e-mails to me.) I now realize too that occasionally I've seen other people's writing and muttered, "Well, that's wrong" when it isn't; it's just a different set of rules.
So I have no decisive or incisive conclusions. I just thank everyone who played along with the poll, and I'm sorry I didn't even manage to pull this post together in less than three weeks. Don't be too harsh on those of us who learned a different rule--but please, keep beating up on people who can't use apostrophes. That one drives me nuts.
Userpics and fandomsThanks to everyone who recommended GIMP. Brilliant Husband made my Monk icon (the one you see here) with OpenOffice, and it was when I tried to install OpenOffice that my previous laptop went belly-up. Well, actually, it was the step before that, when I tried to get X11 so that I could install OpenOffice, but that's getting into a long story that I prefer to forget. I may try GIMP. I probably will try OpenOffice. The computer disaster, however, ate huge chunks out of my time, and I'm still recovering both from the temporal costs and the psychic ones. I will try to make some new icons . . . probably sometime next year. I so need Emerson Cod and Itty Bitty from Pushing Daisies! And I still need a Teyla icon! And Bill Lee! And . . . and . . . and. . . .
In other news, as I may have mentioned, I've fallen down the rabbit hole and am writing a fixit that starts with the last few minutes of Primeval 2.07. If anyone would like to volunteer to beta, please let me know; my usual betas don't watch, I think (and are probably cursing me under their breaths for diverting my time to yet another show). It will be a while before I need a beta, I think. I will warn you in advance: it swings wildly from heavy angst to verging-on-crack humor, with way too much dialogue and far too little action. But hey: the show writers left me with a such a mess to clean up that there has to be a lot of talking, and most of these people aren't particularly good at talking, as we few, we cracky few who watched and discussed the show here know.
I do still have my SG-1 plot bunny folder and the start of a season 9 story that I put aside partly because I had enough plot for a novel and didn't know when I could write it, and partly because I then decided maybe it should be set in season 10 so that I could get Vala in it. I even have scraps of an Unas story that I abandoned because I had no earthly idea what to do with it. I will write more SG-1, I promise, and quite possibly more SGA (if only because the paid writers don't give us enough Carson!).
SGA: 'Identity' (spoilers)
Haven't we seen this before? Wasn't it more interesting last time we saw it? I figured out it was the Ancient Communications Device pretty darned quickly. I failed to feel any concern for Jennifer not because I don't like her (I do) but because I couldn't believe she was in any actual danger. I couldn't care about Evil Woman (whose name I have already forgotten) because she was a cold-blooded killer. No, I was far more concerned for Radek! I don't like it when they write Rodney as completely unconcerned about Radek. He was worried when he first heard about the stabbing, but the ending of the episode really ticked me off! And we didn't get enough Carson!
Sorry--I didn't even realize I was this annoyed.