donkey

   A variant of ass, and used as a mildly insulting term to someone considered to be silly since the beginning of the nineteenth century. ‘You little donkey’ occurs in Charlotte Yonge’s Countess Kate. ‘You butter-fingered donkey’ is used in Shaw’s Arms and the Man to a servant who drops something. (See also Butter-fingers.) In The Battle of the Villa Fiorita, by Rumer Godden, a young English boy tells his sister: ‘Go on, donkey.’ When the word donkey first came into use in the eighteenth century it rhymed with monkey, which has caused speculation that it might derive from the name ‘Duncan’. It is more likely to be connected with the word ‘dun’, ‘brown’.