That being switched makes sense to me, If the hot and ground are switched on one, that one having the knob all the way up is basically grounding the power coming from the other one and vica versa. When the switched on is up and the correctly wired one is down, it's basically using the pots backwards which is kinda cool, pushing the electricity through the body of the pot, which is normally the ground.
There may not be a legal required standard of wire color coding for all electronics, but I've taken apart thousand upon thousand of electronic devices, and there is definitely a common way things are done. Black is usually ground, I'd say 90%+ of the time. Sometimes I've seen white as a ground, maybe brown a few times on something really old. The only time I've seen a red ground was on a friends Nova where he only had 0 gauge red colored wire to run for the battery leads. Red in every other circumstance I've encountered meant it was a hot wire,
Thanks for your help everyone!