Brunet is actually a word. It is the masculine or neutral form of brunette, which is the feminine form. Similar to how blond and blonde works.
And on that note I find it fascinating that the feminine forms of hair color names are becoming the standard spellings.
... Blonde and blond are gender-specific? I thought they were just alternate spellings. ... brunet still doesn't look right. Bluh.
People mixing up "blond" and "blonde" is one of my totally irrational pet peeves. I know it's a tiny nitpicky thing and they're basically interchangeable now BUT STILL.
They're gender specific, yes. It's a French thing that we keep for some fucking reason. Fiance and fiancee are in similar boats in that they have different gendered spellings but the same pronunciation generally. Though fiancée's existence seems to also be waning in English? At least I don't see it nearly as often.
Yeah, I see fiancé for a partner of any gender a lot. Although my personal favorite is when people mistype it as "finance". :D
I've known about the blond/blonde thing for a long time, I think I might have picked it up in middle school? But the brunet/brunette thing I learned much later, and to the part of my subconscious that determines correctness by "is that how I usually see the word spelled," "brunet" still looks wrong. I feel like I, at least, have seen it less often; I don't know if it's actually less commonly used or if I've just missed seeing the places it is used.
I think fiancée is on its way out in English because 90% of the population can't figure out how to type the accented e, and without the é the word looks wrong. The popularity of Pokémon gave it life for a little longer, but it's been twenty years and frankly if you just type it as 'Pokemon' nobody gives a crap anymore.
I get that homonyms are hard and all, but for fuck's sake, "losing his patience" and "loosing his patients" mean two very different things.
Instant mental image: someone unlocks a pen and an army of people in hospital gowns charge down the street a la the Running of the Bulls while Ride of The Valkyries plays in the background. :::PPP
Or losing his patents. [sad adhd writer noises] look, tense is hard... I can only do it consistently in second person present, because Thanks Homestuck is why.
Oh, I totally understand! It just seems like the sort of thing that, you know, beta readers are for. (Especially because I think what I was reading was a giftfic.) And second person present is my go-to like 80% of the time and I barely qualify as Homestuck-knowledgeable, it's a fun tense to use. :D
... I always feel bad that I don't use a beta reader, bc I mostly get too nervous to post things if I let them sit too long/or end up editing it to death. then again, that's why i post to tumblr first, so later i can read through and pick up mistakes before I A03 post.
Most of the people I rely on for betaing are also brainweird, so... I usually catch my tense shifts on rereading and then want to tear our my hair because of the amount of things that just don't sound as good in the other tense.
