If It Needs A Whuppin’, Call It A Donkey

Once again, I have taken it upon myself to address the latest trends in American speech, and once again, the rules of our family newspaper do not allow me to actually print the phrase that I will be discussing today. So I will use a synonym which should safely get me past the delicate sensibilities of our censors:

Kicking donkey.

You know what I mean. Simply replace donkey with its three-letter equivalent, and you will recognize a phrase that has somehow permeated our society. You can’t ride your burro 30 feet in any direction these days without hearing some variation on that vulgar phrase, even on TV and radio. For instance, an ad for an action movie might bellow, “It’s a donkey-kickin’ roller coaster ride!” A truck ad might refer to a “kick-donkey V8 engine.” An ad for Gerber’s Baby Food might tout “the pureed bananas with the kick-donkey taste!”

At least it has nearly reached that point. These two little words are now being put together in a variety of ways with a multitude of delicate nuances. For instance, you might use it as a verb and direct it toward another person, as in, “Hey, moron, get yer hands offa my woman or I’m gonna kick your donkey,” although I recommend that usage only if the moron is smaller than you and is wearing, maybe, a neck brace.

Or you might use it as a noun, as in, “I gave that unspeakable cad Osgood a thorough donkey-kicking after he chipped my finest sherry decanter.”

Or, you can use it as an adjective, as in, “Whoa, dude. That’s a kick-donkey afghan. I didn’t know you were into, like, crocheting.”

Or you can use it as a metaphor, as in, “Yeah, I really kicked Ricky’s donkey in bowling today. I only had three gutter balls the whole game.”

The reason that we English professorial types call that a “metaphor” is because there was no actual kicking of any donkey. Bobby merely defeated Ricky by a score of 78 to 76. However, we Americans in the year 2000 never say we “defeated” anyone anymore, vastly preferring to say that we kicked, or stomped, or whupped their donkey. I believe this is because we are a such a poetic nation.

Of course, we did not invent donkey-whuppin’ here in the year 2000. People have been opening big old cans of whup-donkey on people for many decades. In fact, my Dictionary of American Slang says that “donkey-kicking,” in the sense of functioning well or being highly energetic, is Army slang from many generations ago, no doubt deriving from the even earlier Army meaning of whipping someone’s derriere badly in a fight. So, in a trend that our grandmothers would not have approved, 1940s Army slang has now become witty repartee on elementary school playgrounds.

Actually, the word donkey (I’m still referring to its three-letter equivalent) has been used as an insult word for many, many centuries. The Oxford English Dictionary says that from about the 1500s on, the donkey was used as a figure of stupidity and ignorance in stories and fables. Thus, if you wanted to call somebody an idiot, you called him a donkey. From there it was a natural progression to “kick-donkey rock ‘n’ roll, dude.”

Actually, we missed the intermediate step, in which donkey became the common slang word for one’s posterior. My Oxford English Dictionary (what a fount of knowledge!) informs me that it has nothing to do with the animal, but is merely a variation on the Old English “arse,” which means, well, arse. So I guess I had this “donkey-backwards.” I thought the meaning derived from the attractive view one gets when plowing behind a big dumb farm animal, but if so, we’d probably be out “kickin’ some ox” today.

Now, if we go even deeper into history, we see that the word “ass” goes all the way back to the Bible. In fact, ass may be the only word that is used something like 10 times in the Bible, and yet is still banned by newspapers.

Did you notice that I finally was able to use the word “ass”? It’s not banned when I am talking about the farm animal, only when I am talking about a portion of the anatomy that might need some whuppin’.

So: Ass, ass, ass. I can say it all I want now because I still mean the farm animal (except for the middle one, but nobody has to know that).

These days, the rest of the American public is under no such restriction. They apparently feel free to use it in any sense, all they want. They’re getting away with it, too, because nobody is willing to, shall we say, kick donkey and take names.