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Comment by stuaxo | Hacker News Reader

Wait, do people in the US really call them "orange cats" - I just thought that was a reddit / internet thing.

In the UK these are ginger cats.

Yes. But we also call redheads "redheads" as a rule, not "gingers" - except that the "ginger" thing has filtered over here via the Internet in the past, I dunno, 20 years.

Like, I can't recall anybody describing a redheaded person as a "ginger" in the 80s or 90s, (location: Missouri) it's something I've only encountered since there's been more language cross-pollination due to the Internet.

South Park really spread "ginger" as the term in the US. Since that episode, everyone I know uses ginger instead of redhead, whereas I only learned the word ginger from that episode.

Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVN_0qvuhhw

In the US, "ginger" is a seasoning, not a color. Like, in general; we do not refer to anything as being ginger-colored unless it's a sort of pale yellowish tan.

People will still refer to redheads as "ginger" but only some of the time

That's a fairly new thing. Growing up, I never heard anyone use "ginger" in that way. It was always "redhead." Or sometimes "strawberry blonde" for lighter shades.

Millennial checking in, ginger was used all the time when I was a kid

Only a ginger should call another person ginger.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVN_0qvuhhw

The redhead, ginger, color link comes from early season ginger, which has reddish pink tips around the leaves right above the fresh root.

In UK English ginger isn't exactly a color either. It's not like yellow or orange. It's a state of being.

I don't know why this is being downvoted. Does "ginger-colored" sound right to you? It doesn't quite work.

It's true. A person is ginger, but nobody ever says things are ginger coloured. Ginger isn't even really one colour - it's a spectrum of orange-containing hair colours.

If you would then please explain the "kick a ginger day" from SouthPark

South Park popularized it. It was known but not common before that where I lived. It also popularized harassing them in general at my school.

Were there many reds around when you were growing up? My family is full of redheads, and ginger was a well known term to me. I'm much older than South Park

No, only a couple that I knew of. My area was mostly Mexican, then white, then native, then everything else.

Old south-park is no longer culturally relevant.

We call them orange cats (gatos laranjas) in Portuguese too!

You might be shocked that we say "red heads" instead of ginger as well.

I thought it was popularized by internet/Reddit as a joke denoting that ginger cats are "special": https://www.reddit.com/r/OneOrangeBraincell/

No, they've been orange since long before that. Cause, y'know... that's their color!

Turns out it's a dead tie in English books though, wow: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=orange+cat%2Cg...

It's because they have no soul!

Cookie vs biscuit, vacation vs holiday, gasoline vs petrol, etc, etc.

Cookie and biscuit are two different things. Which two depends on country, but still two different things

The point is what in the Uk is called a biscuit in the US is called a cookie. Similarly for the other pairings.

This sense of biscuit persisted in US English for a long time. The National Biscuit Company (makers of oreos and fig newtons) only changed its name to Nabisco in 1931. The Kennedy Biscuit Company was subsumed by the New York Biscuit Company which merged with the American Biscuit Company to form the National Biscuit Company in 1898. Closes Wikipedia

Do ginger cats make the same biscuits as orange cats?

Though, https://www.reddit.com/r/catsinpants/ works for both forms of English.

Cookies in the UK are a subset of biscuits, but not all biscuits are cookies. Do you not have any other types of biscuits (using the UK term) in the US?

In my YouTube perusal, Can We Identify Every Biscuit/Cookie?! | Sorted Food https://youtu.be/qpY_LTxOG78 (its from the British perspective)

As an American, nearly everything on that table is a cookie or dessert bar. Shortbread and brownies are desert bars. The "water biscuit" is a cracker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_biscuit .

The biscuit of American cuisine doesn't exist in British cuisine. British Highschoolers Try Biscuits and Gravy for the First Time https://youtu.be/KzdbFnv4yWQ

If you don't have Bisquick (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisquick - American flour plus extras base - biscuits with it are 3 parts Bisquick to 1 part milk; bake at 230 °C for 10-13 minutes)...

1.5 cups (190g) flour, 2 teaspoons packing powder, 4 oz (115g) butter (possibly add salt depending on the saltiness of the butter), 3/4 cup (180 ml) milk. This recipe puts it at 200 °C for 15-20 minutes.

That's the only thing that is a biscuit in the US. There are some variations depending on what you add to it (Red Lobster's cheddar biscuits for example)... or buttermilk instead of whole milk, or sweet potatoes instead of flour (from a shortage of flour during the civil war).

No, a biscuit in the US almost universally narrowly refers to a flaky, buttery, savory pastry typically eaten at breakfast, either with a sweet jam or a savory sausage gravy.

“Biscuit” is not a category of foods in the US, while “cookie” is absolutely a category of desert with many different kinds.

If you ask for a biscuit here, you’ll get the same thing every time. If you ask for a cookie, you’ll be asked “what kind?”

No. A biscuit is something entirely different in the US. We just have many types of cookies.

FWIW, I believe petroleum is a synonym for crude oil. If you put it in your cars fuel tank, you'll have a bad time. Gasoline is made from petrolium.

I'm pretty sure petrol means gasoline not petroleum.

Petrol is technically just short for petroleum, which is latin for "rock oil"

Gasoline is from gas + plus the chemical suffix "ol" short for the latin "oleum", and "ine" meaning "made of".

But the etymology of a word doesn't prove that someone is using that word wrong, or people on both sides of the pond would have to start baking our biscuits a second time.

petrol !== petroleum

the confusion is solely in your reading comprehension skills and not in the GP's use of the words

I always found this funny as well. We say ginger cats (chats roux) in French too!

But doesn't roux/rouge just mean "red"?

"Ginger" doesn't mean "red", except for hair color. And that's the interesting part.

Roux is just for hair colour in French. Not the same as rouge.

Ah, thanks, my bad not looking it up, I was feeling so sure I'd know that!

Many places outside the US call them orange as well.

In Australia they're known an ranga cats (ranga as in orangutan).

Hey now, that's prejudice!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVN_0qvuhhw

I'm in the US, but through cultural osmosis, ginger in the UK context is in my vocabulary. I think things like this are going to coalesce, slowly.

I'm an ex Brit, living in the US, and have an orange tabby that I like to say is orange, but his name is "Gingey".

Does that help? :)

I always called the orange even when I was in the UK.

We use both terms here. Ginger has become more popular recently, probably due to UK Internet influence over recent years.

It’s almost entirely due to the South Park episode about gingers lacking souls.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginger_Kids

UK and USA are brotherly nations divided only by their common language.

in italian we call them "red cats"

They are mostly tabbies at the end of the day. But colloquially, yes: the US tends to simply call them orange.

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