west.logan wrote:
Fiancee is for female to be married.
Fiance is for male to be married. He was saying you need to change pronouns or usage of the word.
Also, "
financee"
is for a bank to be married.
To be honest, both "
fiance"
and "
fiancee"
look silly without their accents, i.e. "
fiancé"
and "
fiancée"
. There're a handful of other words along these lines--ironically, "
divorcé/divorcée"
(where the accent is crucial, at least on the first); and "
né/née"
. Why we took words from the French for "
person about to be married"
and "
person no longer married"
and "
original name of a person (often changed because they married)"
, but not "
person
who is married"
, I have no idea. Nor does my spousée.
EDIT to add: As far as I can tell, these are almost the only three words in English that vary based on "
-é/-ée"
endings. The only other one I could find was "
protégé/protégée"
, and I thought I'd never seen the feminine version of that, but the latter does get plenty of hits on Google News, so I suppose people still use it.
Of course, there are several other French loanwords that English continues to distinguish by gender, the most notable of them probably being "
blond/blonde"
.
[Last edited by Tahnan at 03-25-2012 10:40 AM]
