Re-arrange the letters and you get ginger Beliefs concerning...

Re-arrange the letters and you get ginger



Beliefs concerning temperament
A common belief about redheads is that they have fiery tempers and sharp tongues. In Anne of Green **les, a character says of Anne Shirley, the redheaded heroine, that "her temper matches her hair", while in The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield remarks that "People with red hair are supposed to get mad very easily, but Allie [his dead brother] never did, and he had very red hair."

During the early stages of modern medicine, red hair was thought to be a sign of a sanguinetemperament.[112] In the Indian medicinal practice of Ayurveda, redheads are seen as most likely to have a Pitta temperament.

Another belief is that redheads are highly sexed; for example, Jonathan Swift satirizes redhead stereotypes in part four of Gulliver's Travels, "A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms," when he writes that: "It is observed that the red-haired of both sexes are more libidinous and mischievous than the rest, whom yet they much exceed in strength and activity." Swift goes on to write that "neither was the hair of this brute [a Yahoo] of a red colour (which might have been some excuse for an appetite a little irregular) but black as a sloe".[113] Such beliefs were given a veneer of scientific credibility in the 19th century by Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero. They concluded that red hair was associated with crimes of lust, and claimed that 48% of "criminal women" were redheads.[114]

Medieval beliefs
Theophilus Presbyter describes how the blood of a red-haired young man is necessary to create gold from copper, in a mixture with the ashes of a basilisk.[115]

According to Montague Summers, red hair and green eyes were thought to be the sign of a witch, werewolf or vampire during the Middle Ages:

Those whose hair is red, of a certain peculiar shade, are unmistakably vampires. It is significant that in ancient Egypt, as Manetho tells us, human sacrifices were offered at the grave of Osiris, and the victims were red-haired men who were burned, their ashes being scattered far and wide by winnowing-fans. It is held by some authorities that this was done to fertilize the fields and produce a bounteous harvest, red-hair symbolizing the golden wealth of the corn. But these men were called Typhonians, and were representatives not of Osiris but of his evil rival Typhon, whose hair was red.

Medieval antisemitism
During the Spanish Inquisition, people of red hair were identified as Jewish and isolated for persecution.[24] In medieval Italy and Spain, red hair was associated with the heretical nature of Jews and their rejection of Jesus, and thus Judas Iscariot was commonly depicted as red-haired in Italian and Spanish art.[23] Writers from Shakespeare to Dickens would identify Jewish characters by giving them red hair, such as the villainous Jewish characters Shylock and Fagin.[116] The antisemitic association persisted into modern times in Soviet Russia.[21] The medieval prejudice against red-hair may have derived from the ancient biblical tradition, in relation to biblical figures such as Esau and King David. The ancient historian Josephus would mistranslate the Hebrew Torah to describe the more positive figure of King David as 'golden haired', in contrast to the negative figure of Esau, even though the original Hebrew Torah implies that both King David and Esau had 'fiery red hair'.[117]

Modern-day discrimination
In his 1885 book I Say No, Wilkie Collins wrote "The prejudice against habitual silence, among the lower order of the people, is almost as inveterate as the prejudice against red hair."

In his 1895 memoir and history The Gurneys of Earlham, Augustus John Cuthbert Hare described an incident of harassment: "The second son, John, was born in 1750. As a boy he had bright red hair, and it is amusingly recorded that one day in the streets of Norwich a number of boys followed him, pointing to his red locks and saying, "Look at that boy; he's got a bonfire on the top of his head," and that John Gurney was so disgusted that he went to a barber's, had his head shaved, and went home in a wig. He grew up, however, a remarkably attractive-looking young man."[118]


Painting of Frederick Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor from 1155 to 1190, from the Historia Welforum
In British English, the word "ginger" is sometimes used to describe red-headed people (at times in an insulting manner),[119] with terms such as "gingerphobia"[120] and "gingerism"[121] used by the British media. It is roughly the color of dried, powdered ginger root.[122] In Britain, redheads are also sometimes referred to disparagingly as "carrot tops" and "carrot heads" (the comedian "Carrot Top" uses this stage name). "Gingerism" has been compared to racism, although this is widely disputed, and bodies such as the UK Commission for Racial Equality do not monitor cases of discrimination and hate crimes against redheads.[121]

Nonetheless, individuals and families in Britain are targeted for harassment and violence because of their hair colour. In 2003, a 20-year-old was stabbed in the back for "being ginger".[123] In 2007, a UK woman won an award from a tribunal after being sexually harassed and receiving abuse because of her red hair;[124] in the same year, a family in Newcastle upon Tyne, was forced to move twice after being targeted for abuse and hate crimes on account of their red hair.[125] In May 2009, a schoolboy committed suicide after being bullied for having red hair.[126] In 2013, a fourteen-year-old boy in Lincoln had his right arm broken and his head stamped on by three men who attacked him "just because he had red hair"; the three men were subsequently jailed for a combined total of ten years and one month for the attack.[127] This prejudice has been satirised on a number of TV shows. English comedian Catherine Tate (herself a redhead) appeared as a red-haired character in a running sketch of her series The Catherine Tate Show. The sketch saw fictional character Sandra Kemp, who was forced to seek solace in a refuge for ginger people because she had been ostracised from society.[128] The British comedy Bo' Selecta! (starring redhead Leigh Francis) featured a spoof documentary which involved a caricature of Mick Hucknall presenting a show in which celebrities (played by themselves) dyed their hair red for a day and went about daily life being insulted by people; Hucknall, who says that he has repeatedly faced prejudice or been described as ugly on account of his hair colour, argues that Gingerism should be described as a form of racism.[129] Comedian Tim Minchin, himself a redhead, also covered the topic in his song "Prejudice".[130]

The pejorative use of the word "ginger" and related discrimination was used to illustrate a point about racism and prejudice in the "Ginger Kids", "Le Petit Tourette", "It's a Jersey Thing" and "Fatbeard" episodes of South Park.

Film and television programmes often portray school bullies as having red hair.[131] However, children with red hair are often themselves targeted by bullies; "Somebody with ginger hair will stand out from the crowd," says anti-bullying expert Louise Burfitt-Dons.[132]

In Australian slang, redheads are often nicknamed "Blue" or "Bluey".[133] More recently, they have been referred to as "rangas" (a word derived from the red-haired ape, the orangutan), sometimes with derogatory connotations.[134] The word "rufus" (a variant of rufous, a reddish-brown color) has been used in both Australian and British slang to refer to red-headed people.[135]

In November 2008, social networking website Facebook received criticism after a 'Kick a Ginger' group, which aimed to establish a "National Kick a Ginger Day" on 20 November, acquired almost 5,000 members. A 14-year-old boy from Vancouver who ran the Facebook group was subjected to an investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for possible hate crimes.[136]

In December 2009 British supermarket chain Tesco withdrew a Christmas card which had the image of a child with red hair sitting on the lap of Father Christmas, and the words: "Santa loves all kids. Even ginger ones" after customers complained the card was offensive.[137]

In October 2010, Harriet Harman, the former Equality Minister in the British government under Labour, faced accusations of prejudice after she described the red-haired Treasury secretary Danny Alexander as a "ginger rodent".[138]Alexander responded to the insult by stating that he was "proud to be ginger".[139] Harman was subsequently forced to apologise for the comment, after facing criticism for prejudice against a minority group.[140]

In September 2011, Cryos International, one of the world's largest sperm banks, announced that it would no longer accept donations from red-haired men due to low demand from women seeking artificial insemination.[141]


Use of term in Singapore and Malaysia
The term ang mo (Chinese: 红毛; pinyin: hóng máo; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: âng-mo͘) in Hokkien (Min Nan) Chinese, meaning "red-haired",[142] is used in Malaysia and Singapore, although it refers to all white people, never exclusively people with red hair. The epithet is sometimes rendered as ang mo kui (红毛鬼 meaning "red-haired devil", similar to the Cantonese term gweilo ("foreign devil"). Thus it is viewed as racist and derogatory by some people.[143] Others, however, maintain it is acceptable.[144] Despite this ambiguity, it is a widely used term. It appears, for instance, in Singaporean newspapers such as The Straits Times,[145] and in television programmes and films.

The Chinese characters for ang mo are the same as those in the historical Japanese term Kōmō (紅毛, which was used during the Edo period (1603–1868) as an epithet for Dutch or Northern European people. It primarily referred to Dutchtraders who were the only Europeans allowed to trade with Japan during Sakoku, its 200-year period of isolation.[146]

The historic fortress Fort San Domingo in Tamsui, Taiwan was nicknamed ang mo sia (紅毛城.[citation needed]