Back in 2007 (in a very interesting thread which brought me the astonishing news that some young Englishpersons pronounced ginger with /ŋ/, to rhyme with singer, when used as an insult) michael farris wrote:
since we’re already here, is ‘ginger’ meaning red-headed (pretty alien to my dialect) related to ginger the spice? If so, why? Ginger IME is yellowish (yeah, there are some ginger-like spices that are orange-reddish but they’re not ginger in modern usage).
An excellent question to which I’ve never seen a good answer. Now, over at Wordorigins.org, Syntinen Laulu supplies (along with rhymes like “Ginger, you’re barmy,/ You’ll never join the army”) what seems to me a plausible reason:
FWIW, in my London-and-SE-England childhood and youth, although we routinely spoke of ‘ginger hair’ I don’t remember ginger being used as a noun for a red-haired person: we would have been more likely to say ‘X is a gingernut‘. This may well have been a regional thing. (And in this connection I’m surprised that anybody should have been needed an explanation for ginger being used to describe red hair: gingernuts and other ginger-spiced baked goods such as gingerbread men are indeed the colour of ‘red’ hair.)
(We have also talked about the complicated etymology of the word “ginger”, not to mention gingerly.)
Search for “red ginger photos” and many photos will appear.
Ginger cats are also known as orange cats or marmalade cats, which leads me to remark that both ginger marmalade and orange marmalade are well worth your attention.
I loved ginger marmelade when I still was allowed to eat sugary things.
The brown colour of the linked gingernuts is probably due to caramelized sugar. I don’t know if it’s because recipes have extra sugar to offset the strong taste of the ginger, or it’s just a tradition to bake them a bit harder than other cookies. (From a cursory perusal of a recipe site, they do seem to have double the sugar and the same amount of syrup on top. So basically baked sugar).
But we can’t go around calling red-haired people caramel, now can we? (Actually…)
So ginger is a salient taste property of gingernuts, and that reddish brown is a salient colour property. I’m sure that sort of semantic transfer has happened lots of times where we don’t have testimony like Syntinen Laulu’s to elucidate it.
@Hans: mood! And if you dip your gingernuts in your tea, they taste even better.
The OED has the earliest use of ginger, the color, in the context of red fighting cocks: “Ginger ran, at half a dozen blows”, in a 1779 poem by Hawthorn, and also in Grose’s 1785 dictionary (“Red cocks are called gingers.”) Grose, furthemore, has “Ginger hackled, red haired, a term borrowed from the cock pit, where red cocks are called gingers.” The color is first described as such in 1846 (“A reddish-yellow or orange-brown colour, resembling that of dried and powdered ginger”), and ginger cats are recorded in 1874.
I don’t think gingernuts or gingerbread are any redder than “dried and powdered ginger”. I see two competing explanations. One is that the term referred to some darker shade of blonde, and shifted to the red: that matches the plant and explains the lighter color reference (also see the English Dialect Dictionary, “A light red or yellow colour, like ginger”, and Ginger-hackled, […] having red or sandy-coloured hair.”) On the other hand, that doesn’t explain the cock usage: red fowl are quite red. The other explanation is that the term has comes from the association of red color, in people and in animals, with a temperament associated with spiciness. But that doesn’t quite match “sandy-coloured hair”.
My first instinct to reading anything about pronouncing English medial ‹ng› “with /ŋ/” continues to be “what, do you claim to pronounce it without an /ŋ/?” (i.e. I’d expect “without /g/”).
(Obviously I mean cases like singer here and not ginger, lest anyone is confused.)
And doubleposting for topic change: ging-er as an insult seems to me to be riffing off of the common pattern of insults of the form VERB-er, combined with orthographically parsing a root ging in there. And not ginge, even though this would be possible; I’m guessing sing, ring, sting etc. will be a more prominent analogy source here than binge, singe, whinge etc.
The claim that “gingerbread men are indeed the colour of ‘red’ hair” is entirely false in my personal experience. Do they make gingerbread men differently (so that they come out of the oven a different shade) in the sort of foreign places where they spell “color” with a bonus “u”? Or perhaps hat’s experience with gingerbread men (and/or red-haired human beings) has differed from mine if he found this claim plausible rather than bonkers.
I’m thinking Ed Sheeran sort of hair, and gingerbread men this sort of colour https://www.coop.co.uk/products/co-op-free-from-gingerbread-man-50g-gluten-milk-and-egg-free
Although that’s not hugely different from ground ginger – ‘ginger’ as a description is definitely the paler reds rather than auburns, although it might cover broader ground as an insult…
It’s a mystery to me why anyone might think that having reddish hair is worthy of insult at all. I can only attribute this to jealousy.
The only insulting sense of “ginger” I am familiar with myself is the rhyming slang one (dating from the mesolithic* period when such things were also deemed worthy of opprobrium.)
* Or “playground”, as archaeologists call it.
I can’t say I’ve encountered pejorative attitudes toward the red-haired in the U.S. It seems to be a British Isles thing (although most red-haired Americans are probably of British-Island ancestry).
My hair was once described as “auburn” by an undergraduate-era girlfriend with a large vocabulary. But at a higher level of generality my hair is (or was before it started graying …) unambiguously “brown” rather than “red” by U.S. standards, so this implies if accurate that auburn is a subset of “brown” (and there is indeed material variation of shade among the brown-haired). “Auburn” as a hair-color term apparently has a complex medieval etymology that does not accurately predict its current referent, but etymology != destiny as we all know.
The “red ginger photos” of M.’s comment are members of the Zingiber family of plants.
शृङ्गवेर > ζιγγίβερις > zingiber > ginger
As far as there’s any sense to it I suspect it’s really the pale skin – a grown in the dark kind of look…
Mine is the corresponding freckles-but-can’t-tan kind, specially evolved in Scotland, where solar skin damage is a mere traveller’s tale and all skin cancer is due to the side effects of deep-fried Mars Bars.
Is gi[ŋ]er influenced by minger?
(Ming seems to be the only English verb that has an -ing form and an agent noun in -er, but no other forms whatsoever.)
It’s a mystery to me why anyone might think that having reddish hair is worthy of insult at all. I can only attribute this to jealousy
Red hair correlates with being Irish-or-Scottish. Given the messy history of these islands, that might be enough to explain it.
Regarding: “pejorative attitudes toward the red-haired in the U.S. It seems to be a British Isles thing,” not for nothing did Dickens make Fagin a redhead (and a Jew).
Search for “Jews and red hair” for evidence — elsewhere in Europe — of the stereotype that Jews have red hair.
There’s also the scene in Three Men in a Boat where Harris is reluctant to stop at an inn, because the man leaning against its door has red hair, and “didn’t look a nice man at all”; he later relents, because “the poor fellow couldn’t help having red hair.”
The stereotype I mentioned above goes back at least to the Middle Ages. See Paul Franklin Baum’s “Judas’s Red Hair” in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 21, no. 3, July 1922, pp. 520-529.
Late-20th-century British-Irish comedy tropes relating to hair:
* women with blonde hair are stupid
* women with red hair are feisty
* men with blond hair are ugly-haha
* men with red hair are ugly-peculiar
(None of the aforementioned people dye their hair, apart from some of the blonde women. Whether bottle blondes are stupider or less stupid than natural blondes is a topic of ongoing comedic research.)
@M: I have known a non-zero (but possibly still single-digit) number of red-headed Ashkenazic-Americans, but the overwhelming majority of the Red-Headed-American community in my life-to-date experience has been of apparent British-Isles descent, with a skew toward ancestry from what you might call the Q-Celtic Fringe (no Welsh-Americans to the best of my recollection). OTOH, I can imagine Persons of Goidelicness being so rare in parts of Continental Europe in former times that perhaps the occasional red-haired Person of Ashkenazicness was the only exemplar of the phenomenon?
I find it somewhat difficult to believe that in Dickens’ time the red-headed population of London and environs was more heavily Ashkenazic than Irish.
I will say in response to David E. that that prone-to-freckles-but-can’t-tan sort of skin is not unknown among Ashkenazic-Americans (and I assume among non-American Ashkenazim as well), including my late first wife and one of our daughters. But neither she or our daughters has/had hair you would call even a little bit reddish unless dye was involved. And she was pretty highly confident she was non-Scottish — she had distant Ashkenazic-British cousins but they were down south, somewhere out the Edgware Road from central London.
Indeed at one point circa 1994 we were on vacation in the Outer Hebrides and she amused herself by looking through the Stornoway phone book (back when hard-copy phone books were a thing and copies of them were commonly found in hotel rooms) confirming that there were no Cohens, no Levys, no Goldsteins, etc etc and she might well be on the only Person of Judaicness currently on the island. Whereas I had some modest reason to believe that the island’s population probably included a bunch of sixth cousins twice removed (or whatever) of my own, not that I could be arsed to work out the specific paths of genealogical connection.
ugly-haha … ugly-peculiar
Thank you for that. A whole new world has opened before me.
women with blonde hair … men with blond hair
Same as above.
@J.W. Brewer: I’m surprised at the dearth of well-known Scottish Jews. I only know of Ivor Cutler, plus half-Jewish Mark Knopfler and Muriel Spark.
Red hair does indeed seem to be objectively commonest in the Celtic Fringes.* I should perhaps say that in my own family the English are short and dark (and work down coal mines), and the Welsh are tall and fair; my family is historically from North Wales, where there was heavy Irish settlement in the Not-Fair Ages.
The red-haired Jew stereotype perhaps goes back to Ashkenazim being more likely to be red-haired than the surrounding gentiles; after all, nothing says that a stereotype has to be, like, true, once it’s been decided on. Whether it was widely enough propagated to have got to Dickens, even, I do not know. (I agree that it can hardly have been a particular marker of Jewishness in the London of his time, but then Fagin is pretty stereotypical. All credit to CD, he came to see this and tried to make amends for it in Our Mutual Friend, though characteristically going well over the top in the process. Riah is almost as bad as Lizzie Hexam herself.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_hair#Eastern_Europe
* Or Celtic Bangs, as they are more properly known.
I don’t think Russians are generally prejudiced toward ginger-headed people. Though there is one teaser (дразнилка): Рыжий, рыжий, конопатый / Убил дедушку лопатой! (Redhead, redhead, freckled / Killed granddad with a shovel!). Even in my time it was purely literary.
@ David E.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_People_Were_Fair_and_Had_Sky_in_Their_Hair…_But_Now_They%27re_Content_to_Wear_Stars_on_Their_Brows
Wear a tall hat like a druid …
A tall hat and a tattooed gown?
I always hear ‘like the people of the Belgian way’, and it was ages before I discovered what they were actually saying.
(How do you tattoo a gown?)
Belgian
Hey, we’re all vigesimal here.
Ginger Meggs is Australia’s longest running comic strip (since 1921).
“The strip follows the escapades of a red-haired prepubescent mischief-maker who lives in an inner suburban working-class household.” (Wikipedia).
Apparently Harpo’s red wig was on account of him being Irish (in the same way that Chico is Italian):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr9_Cptzl84
Ginger Meggs is Australia’s longest running comic strip (since 1921).
Looks vaguely similar to Dennis the Menace (since 1951), although he has blond hair.
Evidently simply a different instantiation of the Platonic Ur-Dennis.
# Neoplatonism, with its division of worldy and spiritual realms, has played havoc with Christian belief. Not even a great scholar such as John Calvin was completely devoid of its influence. #
Biblical Landmarks
Not even a great scholar such as John Calvin was completely devoid of its influence
Aliquando bonus dormitat Homerus.
(My own feeling on the particular point there discussed is that Calvin here displays the true essence of Calvinism: it provides beautifully logical answers to questions intrinsically unamenable to any logical solution. It is not irrelevant that he was French.)
@David Eddyshaw: Harpo’s brightly colored wig served a pragmatic purpose, in addition to any stylistic factor. It functioned more effectively in the early days, when the brothers were performing on stage, rather than in black-and-white movies; however, in either medium the curly, colored wig made it impossible to get Harpo confused with Chico, who had completely different headgear. Without their costumes, they actually looked very similar, similar enough to impersonate each other occasionally.
…but the photo is barely orangeish brown, and the other photo posted in this thread is a lighter version of that. My hair looks like fine copper wire instead.
My skin, incidentally, has that hue when I’m very, very tanned, a condition I myself can usually only detect by comparing what my upper arm looks like below and above the end of the sleeve and that pretty much only occurs after the annual sunburn.
The etymology seems clear to me: if you cut a ginger root and let it lie around at room temperature for a while, the cut surface turns orange.
Wahre Blondheit kommt von innen.
(play on “true beauty comes from within”)
Yes. I’m usually the only eumelanin-deficient person in the room; we’re so rare there aren’t even any stereotypes about us. (Even the bullying for Just Being Different stops after the first year or two of school, same as with glasses which are of course much more common.) Incidentally, I grew up without seeing red-haired people of the female persuasion (except of course for hair dyed literally red); that probably means even less incentive to come up with a stereotype…
Incidentally, I seem to have a new marker incidentally.
Evidently simply a different instantiation of the Platonic Ur-Dennis.
No, contrary to my (chronologically) last posting, I feel confident in saying that there is no Ur-Dennis: there are two distinct Dennis the Menaces with nothing in common but the name and the superficial conclusions to be drawn from it. U.S. DtM always tries to be helpful, but his enthusiasm and high energy level lead to him making a balls of it, whereas UK DtM is a genuinely malicious bad boy with few redeeming features. In the opposite market, the comic strips are known as Dennis and Dennis and Gnasher respectively: there is no analogue of Gnasher in the U.S. strip. Curiously, the strips first appeared within a few months of each other and quite independently.
This US version is evidently a mere pseudoDennis. It is clear that he lacks the Dennis an Sich.
The etymology seems clear to me: if you cut a ginger root and let it lie around at room temperature for a while, the cut surface turns orange.
It’s not so clear, if the term applied to red chickens first.
there are two distinct Dennis the Menaces
U.S. DtM always tries to be helpful, but his enthusiasm and high energy level lead to him making a balls of it, whereas UK DtM is a genuinely malicious bad boy with few redeeming features.
MARCIONIST HERESY!
If you must condemn the Creator God, don’t do it in the funny pages!
Ah. It’s Dennis the Demiurge you’ll be wanting.
Now I want to see a Dennis the Demiurge comic strip. “Oops, I destroyed another universe!”
This US version is evidently a mere pseudoDennis.
“Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you.” —another famous Welshperson
Search for “Jews and red hair” for evidence — elsewhere in Europe — of the stereotype that Jews have red hair.
I’m reading Margarita Khemlin’s Дознаватель (translated as The Investigator), and I just got to this: Один рыжеватый, по виду еврейчик [One of them was redheaded, a Jew by the looks of him].
MARCIONIST HERESY!
EBIONITE BACKSLIDERISM!!
One of them was redheaded, a Jew by the looks of him
The traditional portrayal of Judas was as a redhead. In As You Like It III:iv, when Rosalind’s lover Orlando fails to show up she thinks him faithless, and she says to her sister and companion Celia “His very hair is of the dissembling color”. Celia demurs, saying “Something browner than Judas’s marry”, but then adds “his kisses are Judas’s own children”.
EBIONITE BACKSLIDERISM!!
Steady on, JC! There is no place for such language in a family blog like this …
Next thing you know it will be Circumcellions, and out will come the cudgels.
Well, we are talking about Israel(ite)s.
Dickens didn’t invent Fagin out of thin air. He was based on a real person very much in the news at the time, Ikey Solomon,
That’s quite a story! He should have stayed in New York…
Yes, being a notorious criminal has never been a barrier to fame and fortune in the Big Apple. But the legal parts of the story are a positively French lesson in absurdity. Ikey’s wife Ann is transported to Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania), and Ikey sails there to be with her and the children. He is recognized as an escaped criminal, but because he hasn’t done anything illegal in VDL, he can’t be arrested without a warrant from London. Six months for the request for the warrant to reach England, six months for it to come back. Ikey is arrested and after some futzing around with bail conditions, habeas corpus, and more bail conditions, shipped to London (another six months), where he is tried and promptly sentenced to … transportation to Australia! Another six months pass until he is back in VDL, where after a year he becomes … a cop. He gets out of that job after a few years, moves back to Hobart, and tries to reconcile with his wife, but it is Too Late….
perhaps goes back to Ashkenazim being more likely to be red-haired than the surrounding gentiles
i’ve heard this claimed before, but i’m extremely skeptical that it has any factual basis, rather than being basically a christian literary trope rooted in depictions of judas. i don’t see a whole lot of difference in the hair-color spread between jewish and non-jewish eastern europeans – just as the jewish communities rooted in any place look pretty much like everyone else from that place. the origins of eastern european red-headedness seems like a potentially interesting question, but one that’s only gonna be obscured by trying to make some kind of jewish/non-jewish distinction.
the notion of some distinctive jewish phenotype collapses with the slightest cross-geographical examination. it persists, as far as i can tell, because a lot of people* have a stake in the fantasy of jews as an isolated blood-lineage, rather than a sprawling archipelago of communities largely formed by affiliation (ritualized or not, often in the context of marriages and relationships).
that same fantasy of separateness leads to all kinds of garbage in discussions of jewish languages as well – people trying to come up with elaborate explanations for ‘how the juhuri came to speak tat’, for instance, rather than just dealing with the fact that what happened was tat-speakers becoming jewish. within a decade or two we’ll be seeing just-so stories about how the abayudaya came to speak luganda, and where to find the aramaic substrate that must be beneath their ‘new’ language.
/end rant
.
* folks who benefit from the idea of jews as eternal, alien Others – mainly integral nationalists, both zionists and their anti-jewish co-ideologists.
The WP article, which is rather light on actual numbers, seems to suggest that red hair is actually relatively common among Slavs. If so, that might perhaps by itself account for a real relatively higher frequency among Ashkenazim (compared with Italians, say) without any need for fanciful ideas about enduring Jewish phenotypes. I wouldn’t be surprised if the ratio of Jews to gentiles were higher than average among nineteenth-century Brits with forebears from predominantly Slav countries, for example: so what was really a marker of Eastern Europeanness might readily get reinterpreted as a marker of Jewishness.
Talking of Italians: L Cornelius Sulla* is supposed to have been redheaded, though it’s always a bit difficult to know what classical writers actually meant in modern terms by their descriptions of hair colour. Apparently early Greek ethnographers were so flummoxed by the appearance of blond Celtic children that they described them as “grey haired.”
* A role model. My own rise to unchallenged power owes much to his example. Also, he knew how to work hard and play hard. What’s not to like?
I’m voting for “one little point mutation that shut the production of eumelanin down”. That’s evidently what I have, together with my father and my great-grandfather, but not my grandfather, who reportedly had black hair (before it turned white), or my brother, whose hair is dark brown (though it started out as blond) and who tans a lot more than I do.
And unspecified Romans apparently said that little Germanic children already had white hair – I can believe that because I went to elementary school with someone with very light blond hair indeed.
@rozele
Clearly there is a lot of cultural baggage and the image of the red-haired Jew has been weaponised and turned into an antisemitic trope. However both Roth (German) and Rossi (Italian) are or were Central European surnames with significant Jewish uptake. I think it might be worth checking if there was a late 18C / early 19C influx of Jewish settlers into Central Europe (now they would be termed economic migrants) from some newly acquired Austrian territory (or from across a new and poorly policed border) where the population had a disproportionate number of redheads. Perhaps somewhere like Galizia or Silesia or somewhere further east?
Of the five children my paternal grandmother had, Father (the eldest) and the next daughter were black-haired and hazel-eyed, the next daughter, who specialized in Urdu and Pakistan, was brown-haired and blue-eyed, and the next son and the last daughter were unashamedly red-haired and blue-eyed. Grandma was black-haired (I guess) and hazel-eyed, and Grandfather, who I never saw, was red-haired and blue-eyed.
But then, so is Weiß AFAIK (mostly -ss), and Blau is exclusively Jewish as far as I’ve noticed… colors come next after precious stones and noble metals, and probably before corrosion (Grünspan).
@dm
Relativamente ai cognomi in uso tanto fra gli ebrei quanto fra i cristiani, basterà far riferimento a “Rossi”. Si tratta di un tipico cognome ebraico. E’ ovvio che non possiamo da qui inferire che le molte centinaia di migliaia di italiani che portano il cognome Rossi siano tutti ebrei o di origine ebraica.
https://www.unipi.it/index.php/news/item/1388-intervista-allo-storico-michele-luzzati
So basically it is an existing name adopted by some Jews (I think we had a similar discussion in another thread about Levin or Lev).
What he is saying here could also apply to Roth in German. But your point seems to be that there is a pattern of German colour names that are either like Weiss or Roth (existing names adopted by Jews), like Blau (new names given to Jews), etc. This weakens but is not inconsistent with the argument that Roth and Weiss could have been applied to individuals because of (ancestral) personal attribute (hair or skin colour).
Here in the U.S. I have known both white people surnamed Black and black people surnamed White. There apparently are or have been Americans (both black and white) surnamed Blue from birth, not counting stage or names etc., but I don’t think I’ve ever known any personally.
As an English surname, “Black” goes back to hair colour.
My eldest son, growing up in Ghana at a stage before he noticed that he and his family were less pigmented than average, used to refer to people on the basis of shirt colour. “Joel, you’re green.” Makes sense.
In Kusaal (and the local languages generally) “red” is what most American “blacks” are; in particular, most southern Ghanaians are “red.”* The probably-real founder of what eventually became the Mossi-Dagomba kingdoms is called Tɔn’ɔs Zin’a “the Red Hunter” in Kusaal (and equivalent cognate terms in other Western Oti-Volta languages.) He was supposed to have come from east of Lake Chad. He would pretty certainly have counted as “black” in the American scheme of things.
* “Africans” is nowadays Ninsabilis “black people”, but I’m pretty sure this usage in calqued on English/French.
“Brown”?
Yes.
There are three colours: white, red and black.
That’s what I thought.
Here in the U.S. I have known both white people surnamed Black and black people surnamed White.
Indeed, Walter White, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People from 1929 to his death in 1955, was socially black, but so pale of skin (photograph) that he could and did safely infiltrate Ku Klux Klan meetings to see what they were up to.