How will people communicate in a few decades? This is a very difficult question to answer when we have the feeling that our language has always been the same or that our ways of communicating don't need to undergo some kind of change. However, the truth is that many expressions of our daily lives will simply disappear. In other cases, some of our terms will change in form, content and meaning.
From a historical point of view, we can see that these changes are not always voluntary, and that they happen because of errors that are difficult to predict. In the case of the term “ass color when it runs away”, some people believe that the term has an almost literal meaning. After all, the brown color that a donkey “catch” after running leagues and leagues along a dirt road may well resemble that strange tone of a car, blouse or hair we see around.
While plausible, this explanation has never been historically proven in any period book, letter or formal document. In fact, the most acceptable explanation of this mystery is found in the old colloquial expression “a donkey run when it runs away”. Recorded by the grammarian Antônio de Castro Lopes (1827 - 1901), the evidence leads us to believe that the mistaken use of the original expression ended up giving rise to the “color of a donkey when it runs away”.
Although the terms have absolutely no connection with each other, this is not the first (and perhaps not the last!) that this kind of transformation by error takes place. Investigating the origin of other terms, we will see that speech is not perpetuated across generations. As well as behaviors, tastes and habits, popular expressions take on features that are threatened by forgetting or the reinvention of someone who listens to a saying in the way they want.
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By Rainer Sousa
Graduated in History
Brazil School Team
Curiosities - Brazil School
Would you like to reference this text in a school or academic work? Look:
SOUSA, Rainer Gonçalves. "Donkey color when you run away"; Brazil School. Available in: https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/curiosidades/cor-burro-quando-foge.htm. Accessed on June 27, 2021.
