L'été

By CENOBYTE

I was always fond of French nouns that began with a vowel, because then I didn’t have to remember the gender of the word. I suck at remembering the gender of words. I have a difficult enough time remembering the gender of some of the people I know, never mind nouns and articles. I think été is feminine.

Admittedly, that words can have gender is an aspect of language that has never made any sense to me. Partly because it’s so seemingly random (in French, the majority of nouns that end in the letter e are feminine in gender and the majority of nouns that do *not* end in e are masculine. In Polish, most feminine nouns end in a), and partly because I don’t understand the need for it. What makes a carpet masculine and a table feminine? Why are mice feminine (can the ’shrew’ comments here) and ceilings masculine? I mean, *why*? What’s the *point* of grammatical gender?