Mindless Musings 01: What the fuck is a ravenette?
If you grew up on Wattpad, you are likely intimately familiar with the type of prose you’d find on your typical, front page recommended young adult novel. Though overuse of attributing physical attributes to descriptors (ie, eyes to orbs, skin to foods) is an expected trope, one that runs rampant is that of the -nette. You know. The ravenette, the greenette, the onenette twonette rednette bluenette. Apparently brunette was not enough, and for some reason this evolved into using “ravenette” as an apt descriptor for someone with dark hair, particularly like that of a raven’s feathers. But where on earth did this come from? When examining the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, brunette is quoted as meaning “a person having brown hair; usually used of a woman or girl and usually spelled brunette in that use; when used of a man or boy usually spelled brunet.” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/brunette).
Though it’s rare to see the proper usage of the descriptor “brunet” rather than “brunette” for a masculine leaning character, at least in modern fiction, we still see this interesting shift where “-nette” grew into being a suffix used in describing the hair colors of characters- sometimes just “-ette”, in the case of the rarely used “pinkette” as a descriptor for a character with, you guessed it, pink hair. But why have we shifted into using these words, and how did we start correlating “-nette” as a suffix relating to hair coloration? Let’s take a quick look at the origin of the word “brunette”.
When examining the Online Etymology Dictionary, we are given a brief description of the word’s history as an adjective. We see it being attributed to being the feminine version of the Old French word “brunet” meaning “brownish, brown-haired, dark-complexioned”, which then is a diminutive of “brun”, meaning “brown”. This itself is of West Germanic origin, originating from the Proto-Germanic word “brunaz”- which is then from the root “bher-“, meaning “bright; brown”. This, supposedly, dates back to the 1400s-1600s. (https://www.etymonline.com/word/brunette). So now we have the answer of where this supposed “-nette” suffix came from, being the feminine version of the diminutive version of a word that literally means “brown”. In that case one could raise an interesting argument of describing masculine black-haired characters as “ravenets” and feminine blue-haired characters as “ravenettes”, but as much as I love going off on tangents, that is a rant for another day. Which means, never.
So now we know where “brunette” came from. We know what it means, why it’s written that way, and generally when it’s used. But we still don’t know why it is that people have started using “-(n)ette” in order to describe a whole host of hair colors. In French, “-et(te)” typically means something small or tiny. It’s an affectionate term that isn’t linguistically all that uncommon; for example in some Spanish dialects you might see the ending “-cito” (pobrecito, jefecito), which is both a diminutive and an affectionate nickname. From there you can come up with any number of theories as to how or why this evolved into using it to describe different hair colors. Using the Wayback machine I could see instances of the word being used as far back as 2001, but with little context behind them.
I’m saddened to say I believe that I have hit a dead end. While it's easy enough to say that the word “ravenette” came about the same way the word “brunette” came about, through the description of a physical attribute through a cutesy diminutive, what I really wanted to know was when did ravenette first start being used? When did BLUENETTE first start being used? Did the word “bluenette” originate in fandom spaces, or in non-fandom spaces? My curiosity will never be satisfied, it seems, unless someone else out there decides on a whim to research this as well.
One more note: it seems like, for some fucking reason, this page on TV tropes manages to accurately attribute “ravenette” and “ravenet” to their appropriately feminine and masculine counterparts. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HairColors. I wish I knew WHO wrote that specific part so I could ask them where in the goddamn they managed to find it, because I haven’t seen them be properly used otherwise.
In conclusion: blame the French.
