There is no such thing as naturally red hair

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"Red" hair is just brown with a little bit of orange. I can kind of understand someone preferring to call it red because it sounds better, but people who insist that is actually red are either color blind or out of touch with reality.

I have always called it "orange hair." It's not red.

Us Gingers are a persecuted species

Oh that's true, I have taken to calling it "ginger" recently, but that's just because of my fondness for Doctor Who. You don't really hear "ginger" too much in the US (outside of that one South Park episode).

And I didn't realize you were ginger. That's not very Jesus-y, is it?

In Polish we have a different word for this sort of red which refers to the color of your hair.

Sickipedia.org has a cool collection of bad taste jokes on gingers

Who calls hair red? Everyone I know calls it ginger. Maybe it's just Americans getting the English language wrong again. Don't know if you've noticed yet but Red Indians are neither red nor Indian.

Last edited by FTM on 30 Dec 2010, 7:01 am, edited 1 time in total.

As well as being black jesus was also a ginger

Anyway, we suck at racism in the UK we can't even pick a proper race to be racist too.

Also theres a habit of say Ging-er instead of Ginge-er phonetically when referring to people with that particular hair colour over here thats a bit lame.

strawberry blonde.


in scotland, ginger usually means irn bru. useless info but there u go.

"There is no such thing as naturally red hair?"
It depends where you're standing.

and black isn't black either. Black is brown.

White isn't white either. White is buff and tan or taupe.



as for us Americans spelling things wrong, we're not the ones who spell most everything with a u.

Red heads are pretty hot, maybe that is where it is from.

Strange i've never heard it used in that context whenever i've been up to see my relations in Glasgow.

If I suspend my disbelief that the stuff isn't poison in a bottle. I quite like Iron Bru

In German, we also call that colour of hair "rot" which translates as "red" into English. I agree that "red" hair is not red in the same way as most other "red" things are, but I still use the word when I'm talking to people from other regions in Germany. When I'm talking to people from my own region, though, I prefer the term "fussig" which is from the local dialect and means the same.

I reckon the reason for this linguistic inconsistency is that "red" hair has been known in Europe for a very long time and Red was the colour that came closest to it inappeareance. The term "orange" was not known in Europe at all until about the Middle Ages, when oranges (the fruit) began to be imported from China. The word first described the fruit and only later was adopted for its colour. Thus quite a number of things were originally described as being red that we would consider orange nowwaddays.

Another example is the European Robin whose name in many European languages bears connection to the colour "Red" it displays at the throat. In German, we call these birds "Rotkehlchen", which means "little red-throat", even though their throat and breast are much closer to Orange as can be seen in this pic.

There is no such as red hair. You are right in that it is brown and orange. The Weasleys have red hair. So do the Tarletons. And Ariel. When I first heard that people referred to that as 'red', I used to think there were people with hair just like Ariel's. To this day, I've never seen anyone with hair that color. Unless they dyed it or something.