I'm pondering blue, actually
The linguistic triumphs of being an ESL immigrant: there have been a few people so far who've reacted to the information that I'm from Romania with a peculiar surprise: "Oh! I wouldn't have guessed it, because you're quite light! All the Romanians I've met have been dark[er]!"
This has given me pause for two reasons.
One: I took "darker" to mean "darker skinned", which... would be a surprise. The vast majority of Romanians are plain white. And we do have a massive chip on our shoulder about being mistaken for Rroma. (There are Romanian Rroma. There are non-Romanian Rroma. There are a lot of non-Rroma Romanians.) (No prizes for saying that six times fast. >.>)
Two: By the time I figured out that maybe "dark" and "light", without other qualifiers, refer to hair, I was far away. But that's not much better, because the next time it happened I feel obliged to disclose that... ta-da-da-dum! I get my hair dyed! Audible gasp. Like, really, if I had pink hair, would they say "Oh, I never met a Romanian with pink hair!"? Well, I hope they wouldn't.
It's not unusual to have one's hair dyed, but it's unusual to have to disclose it to any random person. So... don't do this, please?
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This has given me pause for two reasons.
One: I took "darker" to mean "darker skinned", which... would be a surprise. The vast majority of Romanians are plain white. And we do have a massive chip on our shoulder about being mistaken for Rroma. (There are Romanian Rroma. There are non-Romanian Rroma. There are a lot of non-Rroma Romanians.) (No prizes for saying that six times fast. >.>)
Two: By the time I figured out that maybe "dark" and "light", without other qualifiers, refer to hair, I was far away. But that's not much better, because the next time it happened I feel obliged to disclose that... ta-da-da-dum! I get my hair dyed! Audible gasp. Like, really, if I had pink hair, would they say "Oh, I never met a Romanian with pink hair!"? Well, I hope they wouldn't.
It's not unusual to have one's hair dyed, but it's unusual to have to disclose it to any random person. So... don't do this, please?
If you prefer Dreamwidth, you can reply or read the