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RKN and Mark Twain are partial to donkeys...as opposed to mere men. They attribute to them the simplicity and detachment of saints.
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Jeeves: Yes, sir. I am glad to say that my efforts have been rewarded.
Bertie: What do you mean, your efforts? You aren't going to try to make out that that rotten fire bell scheme of yours had anything to do with it?
Jeeves: Yes, sir.
Bertie: Don't be an ass, Jeeves. It flopped.
Jeeves: Not altogether, sir.....
Bertie: What do you mean, your efforts? You aren't going to try to make out that that rotten fire bell scheme of yours had anything to do with it?
Bertie: Don't be an ass, Jeeves. It flopped.
Jeeves: Not altogether, sir.....
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What is the difference between donkey and ass? They mean the same thing, although for donkey my dictionary adds the comment: "Etymology dubious." The terms are interchangeable. When one tires of saying ass one takes up the word donkey....
...RKN
RKN and Mark Twain are partial to donkeys...as opposed to mere men. They attribute to them the simplicity and detachment of saints.
But this was not so with our teachers and parents when we were in school in our village Muthukur in the early 1950s.
Muthukur was then full of donkeys...I mean the animals. They were all over the streets, on the tank bed, and under the neem trees. We were friends with them rather. Some of our rowdy classmates used to ride them and mount them. I also heard stories of donkeys kicking their tormentors fatally.
But when I returned to Muthukur in 2010 to show my wife and son our famed Muthukur donkeys, it was a disaster. I asked our driver to take our taxi to every nook and corner of the village and the tank on the outskirts. To no avail. We couldn't spot even a single donkey. They had all vanished and I wondered like that kid in The Catcher in the Rye: "Where did all the ducks go when the river froze?"
All the donkeys were replaced by mopeds like Luna and TVS XL 60.
Unlike RKN we didn't have to bother about the difference between ass and donkey...we just had one word for it in Telugu: Gadida. Its etymology is obvious...it comes from the Sanskrit word Gardhab. All of us, male and female, were called:
"Gadida!" ...("Donkey!")
by our teachers and parents when they were vexed with our stupidity.
By when I arrived at IIT KGP and was mixing with Hindi friends I came to know that the male donkey had a different name than the female one:
"Gaddha and Gaddhi"
That was truly a linguistic advancement.
Anyway, when we were called Donkey in school, our teachers never meant we were saintly. They meant we were foolish, stupid, and occasionally obstinate.
But the term was used with a light texture of endearment...as if we had to be more pitied than beat up.
The foolishness of donkeys was illustrated by the fable where the dog of a dhobi was angry with his master and declined to bark when a burglar entered...and the donkey volunteered to bray instead....with disastrous consequences to the donkey...
This sort of a thing we never did when we were kids but we did occasionally indulge in this foolishness when we were growing up...I think there is no exception...we all stopped doing it only when we were beat up, metaphorically, for our noble gesture by our bosses...which again shows that bookish knowledge is of little use...experience alone counts.
When we were young and our teachers and parents were fed up with calling us donkeys...and didn't have the option of calling us asses in Telugu...they called us:
"Gadida Kodaka!"...(Son of a donkey!)
Once again there was no feminine equivalent for this abuse:
I don't think there is one even in the advanced national tongue called Hindi:
"Gaddha-Beti" or "Gaddhi-Beti!...et al
Strange!
Why the son of a donkey should be any worse than a donkey, in those days of poor genetics, is not clear.
I heard a discussion between my parents when Father called me, when he was in a fractious mood:
"Son of a Donkey!"
My mom laughed at him and quipped:
"That means you are yourself a donkey!"
But Father was smarter and retorted:
"No! It means he is not my son but a donkey's"
All quiet.
Good that Telugu didn't have words for female donkeys and their daughters since that would make the Gender Equality quite intractable.
The stupidity of donkeys was illustrated by one more tale we had in our Moral Science:
A merchant had this donkey to transport his bag of salt everyday to the neighboring village. And they had to cross a stream on their way.
One day the donkey slipped and fell down along with the bag of salt on its back. And by the time the merchant helped get it up, much of the salt got dissolved in water and the bag became lighter.
The donkey loved it and faked the drill next morning...and the next...and the next...
Like all other stories in our Moral Science books, the Moral of this story was rather obscure and not really helpful in our lives...unlike that of the donkey who brayed for the dog...
Maybe it meant that if we made money by crooked means like fixing our overs repeatedly, we will get caught one day and jailed...
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