Invisible appearance details.

Authoring Inform 7
#1

I have characters; These characters have hair; Hair has some text called length, like so:

Some hair is a part of every person.[ The printed plural name of hair is "hair".] Every hair has some text called length. Length is usually "short".
I’m trying to get the hair’s length to show up when the player looks at characters, and not specifically at their hair, but Say "It has [the length of target's hair]"; or Say "It has [the length of random hair which is part of the target]"; can’t be parsed by Inform 7. It has [the length of Sally's hair]"; works, but I’m sure there must be a better method than having to write a nearly-identical line of code for every single character in the game. What am I missing?

#2

(untested:)

if hair (called H) is part of the noun:
    say "It has [the length of H].";

That’s assuming that hair is a kind of thing, and that these lines go in an examine action (or some other action where the noun is a person).

#3

Where are you defining “target”? What’s the context of the say phrases?

#4

Aha! The key was that I was using “target” thinking it was the correct term for “noun” in this context. Say "It has [the length of random hair which is part of the target]"; works perfectly!

Thanks, Juhana!