The Reddening of the Hair shall now commence.

I read this Michael Brooke post about a promotional offer by the London Zoo, in honor of the birth of their new monkey, and I learned something new: not about monkeys, but about language, which is all-the-more useful to me. I did not know that the word "ginger" can be used to describe persons (and non-humans) with red hair. This is good news to me, because my store of adjectives to describe red hair has pretty much been limited to "red hair" and also "auburn hair" (along with the occasional metaphorical euphemism, such as, "Her hair was the color of the hills in late September"). So now I have a new option. Cool!

(This is no small thing, since a quick perusal of the Move Over Britney! archives will reveal a predilection on my part for redheads, to the point where the recently-rejected novel's heroine sports long, auburn hair. In fact, a beta-reader of an earlier manuscript actually pointed out that I had no fewer than four "ginger-haired" characters in the thing, a goofy happenstance that I have since rectified by making one of them chestnut-haired, one yellow-haired, and the third one bald. The heroine kept her auburn hair, because she just doesn't look right in my mind's eye with anything else.)