this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2026
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As someone who grew up down south in the UK, it's "knock down ginger"
I have no idea who ginger is and what they have to do with prank knocking
If you rearrange some of the letters in ginger you get the hate crime version of the name from the US South.
Hmm.... That didn't seem right to me, so I looked it up
https://professionalmoron.com/2022/04/18/history-of-knock-knock-ginger/
That feels a bit more like it to me, though surprised it's not even a century old, I figured it was Victorian
Yeah a poem about whipping gingers on the back. From 1967.
Redheads still have it rough, but it's gotten a lot better over the years. In the US we still use "redheaded stepchild" to mean someone or something clearly unwanted and mistreated. Especially in the form of "to beat like a redheaded stepchild"
Also from southern UK and we called it knock down ginger. Looked it up and found this:
https://idiomorigins.org/origin/knock-down-ginger
Where ginger is to move "gingerly" i.e. cautiously or carefully. Can't comment on how valid that is but that website says the term has been in use since the 19th century.
Uh... Who is going to tell him?
We called it "Knock a Door Ginger". Like you, never understood the Ginger significance
Likely some casual irish racism in a similar vein to the Southern US calling it n* knocking, although in my town no one ever called it that, it was ding dong ditching
I'm from pretty much bang centre of the UK and we called it Postman's Knock.
Do you want to know why? Well I've no fucking idea. My brother called it that so I called it that.