I'm sorry... the fluidity of language is always a fascinating topic, but I have to say you are seriously reaching here. Normally I wouldn't bother arguing something in a thread like this, but your (possibly unintentional) characterization of "beer noobs" as absolute idiots is just beyond wrong.
Beer noobs aren't necessarily any stupider than beer geeks. They know what dark means. But since dark is a relative term, one can only compare beers to their own sense of what an average beer is - and in their case, it happens to be light lagers. So when they pick up an IPA and say it's dark, even though we consider them to be lighter, or "pale", beers, they don't mean strong, they literally mean dark. If you give them a rich, 10% Belgian Golden Strong Ale - a "strong" beer even by most beer geeks' standards - that also happens to sit at 3 SRM, not even beer noobs are going to seriously call it "dark" just because it's strong (assuming they're not in the absolute LOWEST percentiles of intelligence). I'm not going to say NOBODY would ever call it dark, since some people might even have their perceptions clouded by certain expectations of homebrew/craft beer (e.g. my dad smelled a Munich Helles I was drinking before taking a sip, and remarked that it smelled strong, as he does with everything that I drink.)
On the other hand, if you pour a beer noob a can of Guinness Draught, whose watery taste and ABV of around 4% makes it quite a weak beer by any measure, they're still going to note that it's dark as hell, and are pretty much guaranteed to tell you that it is much darker than the Belgian Golden Strong. It can be fun to make fun of beer noobs' ignorance on the subject, but being a light lager drinker doesn't make a person so mentally handicapped that they confuse the meaning of dark.
And while I'm at it, I'll just add that "strong" is merely one definition of "stout", and not even close to the most commonly used. Outside of beer, it has been primarily used for quite some time now to describe a person who is actually fat, portly, rotund, etc. And next to that, it's seen far more usage as a synonym for "bold." And "bold" actually seems like a pretty good way to describe the heavy roastiness of a typical stout, especially when you consider that "stout" is merely a shortened form for the original name of the style, "stout porter". In other words, it was used to describe a bolder version of porter, which seems like a reasonably accurate use of the word to me.
