Okay. Here is the thing. Shrek is one of the best movies ever. One of the key players in the film is “Donkey,” who sounds an awful lot like Eddie Murphy.
Donkey.
And now a pivot.
I grew up in the city. The city of Dayton. And while I’ve been living in rural Ohio for nearly 34 years now, I feel that I am always slow to catch onto things. As they say, “You can take the girl out of the city, but you can’t take the city out of the girl.”
It’s not everything about rural life that confounds me. In fact, in most case scenarios, I have thrived. But it is the gosh darn terminology of everything in the country that gets me. Here’s the thing. In the city, we knew that somewhere in the world, there were cows and horses. Pigs. Chickens, even. And that was good enough for us.
But out here in the country, people talk about bulls and heifers. Hens. Cocks. Mares, and colts, and fillies, and such. And don’t even get me started on the crossovers.
Like, well, in Shrek. Donkeys.
I keep trying to understand. Donkeys are descendants of the African wild ass, and they’re related to horses and zebras. And people seem to use certain words interchangeably, but donkey, jackass, burro, and mule aren’t really synonyms. Each term does relate to a donkey, but a jackass is not a mule, and all burros are not jackasses. (Following along?). If you are, I am not.
But I’ll break it down, once again, for myself. I’ll have you know I’m writing this with a Sharpie marker on the inside of my forearm, too.
So then. What’s a donkey? A donkey is a domestic member of the horse family.
See. Right there. Just a minute ago, they were descendants of the African wild ass. So does that make horses wild asses too?
Anyway, donkeys, I know, are hard workers and have been hauling goods since 4000 B.C.E., according to Encyclopedia Britannica.
Donkeys are stockier and stronger and have much different personalities than horses and zebras. Donkeys don’t startle easily. Surefooted. They can carry twice their own body weight. Donkeys can be protectors, too, like sheep or goats.
But I still don’t know about the horse and the wild ass connection.
Anyway, let us complicate matters further.
A jackass is just a male donkey. While ass is interchangeable with donkey, “jackass” refers specifically to a male donkey.
Ass = Any old donkey. Jackass = Any old MALE donkey. Okay. Jack. So is a Jillass, a female donkey?
Oh, no, no, no. No Jack and Jill. Nope. Female donkeys are called “jennies” or “jennets,” but a female ready to breed is known as a “broodmare.” See what I mean about these country people and their terminology?
It gets even worse. Bring on the burro.
A burro is a wild donkey. It is also the Spanish term for the common working donkey in Spain and Mexico. And the English people started to say “burro” when Spaniards brought burros to America’s southwest in the 1500s.
So. This means unlike the jackass and mule, burro is actually just another way to say donkey.
Okay. But we are not even close to being done.
Now comes the mule.
So, what’s a mule?
The word “mule” isn’t just another name for donkey, as I’ve found out. A mule is the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse.
Male donkey + female horse = mules.
Mules are typically bigger than donkeys and usually have the body of a horse and the extremities of a donkey. Their sounds are a blend of both parents; a mule bray begins with the common horse whinny and finishes with the hee-haw bray of a donkey.
Okay. So mules happen when a male donkey and a female horse get busy.
What, then, occurs when a male horse and a female donkey start fooling around?
My brain is on donkey overload.
What do you call a donkey with three legs?
From what I’ve read here, you would still call him “donkey.” Unless it’s a male. Then it’s jackass.
Either way, I feel sorry for the thing, what with only three legs.
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“Definitions are to the mind what straitjackets are to the body.” – Henry Ward Beecher
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“The only way to define anything is in terms of something else.” – Alfred North Whitehead
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“Words are, of course, the only things that give order to our perceptions of the world.” – Virginia Woolf
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What do you call a donkey? Donkey.
