Is Tamra Barney of “The Real Housewives of Orange Country” engaged to a woman? According to Yahoo! omg!, she is:
For the Yahoo! editors and writers who never took French in high school — or fail freshman French — the double EE at the end of the word fiancée indicates that the person is a female. The male equivalent of an engaged person is fiancé.
Has Miley Cyrus undergone sexual reassignment surgery, because according to Yahoo! Movies, she’s now a man engaged to Liam Hemsworth:
An engaged man is a fiancé; an engaged woman, a fiancée.
Does Miley Cyrus’ short new haircut make her look too much like a guy? Is that why the writer for Yahoo! omg! referred to her as Liam Hemsworth’s fiancé?
With its one E, fiancé is a male who is engaged. The female version is fiancée — the addition of the letter E makes it a female noun. Apparently the writer didn’t study French in high school. That might explain the use of the incorrect word. But it doesn’t explain why a professional writer would use an apostrophe to form the plural of Hemsworth.
Has Rosie O’Donnell called off her engagement to fiancée Michelle Rounds in favor of marrying a man? The startling revelation comes direct from the Yahoo! front page, so you know there’s something going on:
OK, what’s really going on is this: The writer doesn’t know that a fiancé is a male; a fiancée is a female. And Rosie is engaged to the ladder latter.
Is Britney Spears secretly engaged to a woman? That’s what it says on the Yahoo! front page:
An engaged male is a fiancé; an engaged female, a fiancée
One person in this photo on Yahoo! Shine is Alec Baldwin’s fiancé:
It’s gotta be the guy in the hat because a woman can’t be a fiancé, only a fiancée.
I think the regular editors over at the Yahoo! front page have left the building. Amateurs seem to have taken control of yahoo.com, making more than the usual number of mistakes.
I’m guessin’ that the B-team consisted of third-grade dropouts who left school before the lesson on forming the possessive women’s:
It must have been the same day that the teacher covered the subject of proper nouns (the ones that need a big letter) and common nouns (like caucus):
OK, maybe I shouldn’t expect a third-grade dropout to know the difference between a fiancé (who is male) and a fiancée (who is female), so this is forgivable, right?
A corporate blog reflects not just on the writer, but on the company as well. So, it’s reasonable to think that a company would assign the task of maintaining the blog to its best writers, and it would ensure that it is grammatically correct, correctly spelled, and accurate.
So, maybe Yodel Anecdotal, the company blog for Yahoo!, reflects the best the company has to offer. Perhaps no one at Yahoo! knows the difference between a fiancé (a male) and a fiancée (not a male). Perchance no one cares about the missing hyphens in 20.5-carat, groom-to-be, or mega-celebrity. Perchance, no one is capable of noticing a missing word or the redundancy in “and they also”:
Maybe, just maybe, this really is the best the company has to offer.
I have no idea who this guy was engaged to, but apparently he’s suing his boyfriend. If he was engaged to his boyfriend, there would be two fiancés.
This engagement enigma was brought to you by Yahoo! Shine, where writers don’t know the difference between a fiancé (which is a male) and a fiancée (which is a female).
Due to the writer’s inability to tell the correct word from a word that sounds like it, this excerpt from Yahoo! TV‘s “Daytime in No Time” is actually quite amusing:
For those needing additional explanation (I’m looking at you, Yahoo! writers and editors), the correct expression is due to the fact and the correct word is fiancé (which is a male).
