I was adding some notes to a document that was shared by a few folks at work. Others had already made some updates and used different colors to make the updates stand out. Since blue and green had already been used, I used red for my changes.

A coworker told me that using a red font was offensive because American schoolteachers used red ink to mark students’ work and Americans had been so traumatized by this that seeing a red font caused emotional pain.

I’d never heard of this and initially thought that my coworker was making this up. I asked around and found that most folks around here associated red ink with schoolteachers’ admonishments. Pam tells me that this was the case in Canada too.

It makes me curious about whether Brits have this concern about red ink. That would make me completely oblivious in three countries.

It still seems to be a bloody stupid thing to be worried about.

Somehow, this reminded me that the color vermilion was reserved for Chinese emperors. So I used vermilion for this post and folks don’t need to worry that I used red.