Ranga

Ranga (pronounced rang-ah)

In Australian slang, a person with red (ginger, auburn etc) hair.

1990s: Based on the name orangutan (pronounced aw-rang-oo-tan, oh-rang-oo-tan or uh-rang-oo-tan), any of three endangered species of long-armed, arboreal anthropoid great ape, the only extant members of the subfamily Ponginae, inhabiting Borneo (Pongo pygmaeus) and Sumatra (P. abelii).  The three species are Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus), Sumatran orangutan (Pongo abelii) and Tapanuli orangutan (Pongo tapanuliensis).  Ranga is a noun; the noun plural is rangas.  Australians tend to be linguistic reductionists and one is deemed either a ranga or not but presumably there can be "gray areas" (there may, in this context, be a better way of putting that) so adjectives such as rangaish or rangaesque could be coined as required.

A ketchup of gingers?  Roodharigendag in the Netherlands.

Since 2005 (except in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic put a stop to the fun), the Netherlands has hosted what is described as the "world's largest gathering of redheads".  Were the three-day festival (which attracts participants from over eighty nations) staged in certain other countries it might have gained a playful, fanciful name but the practical Dutch unadventurously used Roodharigendag (Redhead Day) which does have the virtue of being unambiguous.  There are a variety of events including lectures and pub-crawls; presumably, coffee shops are visited and perhaps the proprietors offer special blends of red-themed weed for the event.  If not, presumably "Fanta Orange" (€13 per gram in mid 2024) sales spike.

An Orangutan in the Sumatran jungle.  International Orangutan Day is 19 August.

Despite the first element of orangutan (orang) appearing to be a clipping of “orange” (a reasonable assumption given the creature’s vaguely orange-hued coat although zoologists describe it usually as “reddish-brown”), the term has nothing to do with coloration and is not derived from English sources.  Orangutan describes any of the three species of arboreal anthropoid ape, which comprise the genus Pongo, native to Borneo and Sumatra and as late as 1996 were listed as a single species in the taxonomic, based on the first scientific classification (as Homo Sylvestris) in 1758 by Swedish zoologist & physician Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778 and styled as Carl von Linné after 1761).  After being divided in 1996, the third species definitively was identified in 2017.  Even in English there are a dozen-odd alternative spellings and unmodified and variant forms appear in many languages.  The construct of orang-utan was from the Malay: orang (person, man) + hutan (forest) thus literally “forest man”.

Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) was an English novelist and poet but despite a background in literature and little else, through family connections he was in 1819 appointed an administrator in the East India Company (which “sort of” ran British India in the years before the Raj).  It was an example of the tradition of “amateurism” much admired by the British establishment, something which didn’t survive the harsher economic realities of the late twentieth century although some still affect the style.  Despite being untrained in such matters, his career with the company was long and successful so he must have had a flair for the business although his duties were not so onerous as to preclude him from continuing to write both original compositions and works of literary analysis.  Peacock's second novel was the Regency-era three volume novel Melincourt (1817).  It was an ambitious work which explored issues as diverse as slavery, aspects of democracy and potential for currency destabilization inherent in the issue of paper money.  Another theme was the matter of differentiating between human beings and other animals, a central character being Sir Oran Haut-ton, an exquisitely mannered, musically gifted orangutan standing for election to the House of Commons.  The idea was thus of “an animal mimicking humanity” and the troubled English mathematician Dr Alan Turing (1912–1954) read Melincourt in 1948, some twelve months before he published a paper which included his “imitation game” (which came to be called the “Turing test”).  Turing was interested in “a machine mimicking humanity” and what the test involved was a subject reading the transcript of a natural-language conversation between a human and a machine, the object being to guess which interlocutor was the machine.  The test was for decades an element in AI (artificial intelligence) research and work on “natural language” computer interfaces but the field became a bit of a minefield because it was so littered with words like “feelings”, learning”, “thinking” and “consciousness”, the implications of which saw many a tangent followed.  Of course, by the 2020s the allegation bots like ChatGPT and character.ai have been suggesting their interlocutors commit suicide means it may be assumed that, at least for some subjects, the machine may have assumed a convincing human-like demeanour.  The next great step will be in the matter of thinking, feelings and consciousness when bio-computers are ready to be tested.  Bio-computers are speculative hybrids which combine what digital hardware is good at (storage, retrieval, computation etc) with a biological unit emulating a brain (good at thinking, imagining and, maybe, attaining self-awareness and thus consciousness).

Because, of the origin, to call someone a ranga is to compare them to a sub-human primate, so it might have been thought offensive but it remains widely used and is one of the additions to English which has spread from Australia.  Possibly the fact the world's redheads are almost exclusively white meant the comparisons with the orangutan weren't historically or culturally "loaded" so it never became more than a minor micro-aggression.  It certainly can be offensive and is often (though apparently mostly by children) used that way but it can also be a neutral descriptor or a form of self-identification by the red-headed.  It may be that many of those who deploy ranga (for whatever purpose) are unaware of the connection with sub-human primate and treat it as just another word; in that sense it’s actually less explicit than some of the many alternatives with a longer linguistic lineage including "ginger minge", "fire crotch", "carrot top", Fanta (not always capitalized) pants", "rusty crotch" and "blood nuts".  Whether ranga is more or less offensive than any of those (none of which reference apes) is something on which not all redheads may agree but in 2017 (some months on from ranga being added to the Australian Macquarie Dictionary), presumably so there was a forum to discuss such matters, RANGA (the Red And Nearly Ginger Association) was formed, finding its natural home on social media where it operates to provide social support rather than being a pressure group.  

There was also the Australian moniker “blue” (and, being Australia, the inevitable “bluey”) to describe redheads and most dictionaries of slang suggest the origin was in the tradition of “lofty” or “stretch” sometimes being applied to the notably short (ie the stark contrast between “red” and “blue”).  There is the suggestion it may have been an allusion to the propensity of “hot-headed” redheads to “start a blue” (ie start a fight, that use another of the nation’s many re-purposings of the word) but there’s no documentary evidence.  However, there is an established connection between “orange” & “blue”, a number of orange-flavored liqueurs dyed blue, Blue Curaçao the best-known.  According to historians of the industry, the blue dye came to be used just for the visual novelty, blue uncommon in natural foods or drinks and the striking colour was a point of differentiation with the many other orange-colored beverages.  Curaçao liqueur originated on the Caribbean island of Curaçao and was made using the dried peel of the laraha (a bitter orange).  Originally distilled as a clear or amber fluid, various vivid artificial colors (blue, green, orange, red) were added just to create different brands and Blue Curaçao became the most popular becoming almost synonymous with the striking blue cocktails (Blue Lagoon, Blue Hawaiian etc) in which it is an ingredient.  Because the blue dye (typically Brilliant Blue FCF, aka E133) has no taste, the orange flavour remains unaffected.

Ginger, copper, auburn & chestnut are variations on the theme of red-headedness: Lindsay Lohan demonstrates the possibilities.  Red hair is the result of a mutation in the melanocortin 1 receptor (MC1R) gene responsible for producing the MC1R protein which plays a crucial role also in determining skin-tone. When the MC1R gene is functioning normally, it helps produce eumelanin, a type of melanin that gives hair a dark color.  However, a certain mutation in the MC1R gene leads to the production of pheomelanin which results in red hair.  Individuals with two copies of the mutated MC1R gene (one from each parent) typically have red hair, fair skin, and a higher sensitivity to ultraviolet (UV) light, a genetic variation found most often in those of northern & western European descent.

Just as blonde women have long been objectified and derided as of limited intelligence (ie the "dumb" blonde), redheads have been stereotyped as sexually promiscuous (women) or having fiery tempers (men & women) but there is no evidence supporting any relationship between hair color, personality type or temperament.  The sample sizes are inherently small (redheads less than 2% of the global population) but there are populations in which the predominance is higher, so further research would be interesting but such questions are of course now unfashionable.  Most style guides list "red-haired”, “redhead” & “redheaded” as acceptable descriptors but the modern practice is wherever possible to avoid references which apply to physical characteristics, much as the suggestion now is not to invoke any term related to race or ethnic origin.  That way nothing can go wrong.  If it’s a purely technical matter, such as hair products, then descriptors are unavoidable (part-numbers not as helpful at the retail level) and there’s quite an array, ranging from light ginger at the lighter end to chestnuts and and auburns at the darker and there was a time when auburn was used as something of a class-identifier.

Jessica Gagen, Miss England, 2022.

Winner of Miss England 2022 (the first redhead to claim the crown (which really was a crown rather than the tiara some contests award)), Miss World Europe 2023 & Miss United Kingdom 2024, Jessica Gagen (b 1996) holds a bachelor's degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Liverpool, and is an advocate for women and girls in STEM (science, technology, engineering & math).  Having been subject to "rangaphobia" bullying as a child, Ms Gagen used her platform to spread a positive message to those who have also suffered cruel taunts about being red-headed.  After leaving school, Ms Gagen discovered one advantage her locks afforded was they attracted modeling agencies and, as a multi-tasker, she pursued a lucrative international career in conjunction with her studies.  Her interest in encouraging women to enter STEM fields came while at university when the paucity of female participation in her engineering course was obvious in male-dominated lecture theatres and tutorial rooms.

Peak Jessica: Jessica Gagen pictured cooling off during one of England's increasingly frequent heat-waves when temperatures reached a record 42^o C (108^o F), something long thought impossible because of the interplay of the movement of water and sea currents around the British Isles.  It's an urban myth redheads (being "hot-headed" in the popular imagination) need more than most to "cool down" when the temperature is high. 

Interestingly, Ms Gagen says participation in beauty contests changed her perception of them as sexist displays, regarding that view as archaic, noting the women involved all seemed to have their own motives, usually involving raising awareness about something of personal interest.  Being part of the subset of humanity likely to do well in beauty contests (a matter of concern among some critical theorists) is of course just a form of comparative advantage in the way some benefit from  a genetic mix which makes them ideal basketball players.  The beauty contest is thus an economic opportunity and choosing to participate in one can be a rational choice in that one's allocation of time and resources can yield greater returns than the alternatives.  Another notable thing about Jessica Gagen is that being born in 1996, she is part of that sub-set of the population called “peak Jessica”, the cohort which reflected the extraordinary popularity of the name between 1981-1997, overlapping slightly with “peak Jennifer” which occurred between 1970-1984.