Mea Culpa: yes but what gender is his hair?

Hair colour, confiding, clickbait and other usage glitches in this week’s Independent

A one-eyed Kirk Douglas gets his hands on Janet Leigh in The Vikings (1958)

I prefer the way we did it in a tribute to Kirk Douglas on Friday, but the Oxford Dictionary disagrees. To mark Douglas’s 100th birthday, we listed 10 of his best films, starting with The Vikings (1958), and said: “Try not to be distracted by Douglas’s blond thatch and Leigh’s brassiere, both of which should have won best supporting Oscars.”

According to the Oxford Dictionary, that would “typically” be “blonde” in British English, although “blond” is usual in American English. I suspect that if we had referred to a woman’s hair, we would have added an “e”.

However, the word comes from the French, and hair in French is a masculine noun. To make it more complicated, cheveux is a masculine plural, so the adjective in French is blonds, but that would be silly in English.

I think we should stick to blond as the adjective in English, and avoid calling, say, Boris Johnson a blond or Brigitte Bardot a blonde woman, because it is better not to define someone by their hair colour.

More gender confusion: We often have a similar problem with another import from French. We quoted something that Pep Guardiola, the Manchester City manager, had said to Marti Perarnau, and described Perarnau as “confidante and author”. As Perarnau is a man, he would be a “confidant”.

Slow-motion plane crash: This is the second paragraph of a news story last Friday about a plane crash in Colombia: “Erwin Tumiri, one of the two flight crew members to survive and six people who were found alive overall, has talked the media through the final minutes on LaMia Flight CP2933, which crashed in the mountainous region outside the Colombian city of Medellin that left 71 people dead.”

That is, as Malcolm Kersey wrote to say, a long and tortuous sentence. It is not helped by the curious notion of people found “alive overall”, rather than in part, and the collapse of sentence structure at the end, by which the “mountainous region” seems to have left 71 people dead.

It could have read: “Erwin Tumiri, one of the two flight crew members among the six people who survived, has talked journalists through the final minutes on LaMia Flight CP2933. The plane crashed in mountains outside the Colombian city of Medellin, leaving 71 people dead.”

True story: The word “clickbait” often seems to be a way of sneering at successful journalism. It describes what good headlines have always done, which is attract the interest of the reader. The temptation may be to distort the headline beyond what the words below it will bear, but any media organisation that does this too often will pay a price as readers realise that that they are buying a pup every time.

So it is important to make headlines accurate as well as dramatic. A slip-up occurred with the short headline on a business news report on Friday: “UK Government sells National Grid to China.”

As the story explained, National Grid, the privatised utility company, is selling its gas pipe network to a foreign consortium, led by an Australian bank and including the Chinese and Qatari governments. So it is fair to say that it is being “sold to China”, but it is not right to say that it is National Grid that is being sold or that the Government is selling it. As the story says, the Government could block the sale, and the Prime Minister had hinted that she might, and it has chosen not to.

But one and a half true facts out of the three in the headline is a low score.