Los pelos de la burra
One of the most colorful animals in the Mexican repertoire of sayings and metaphorical phrases is the donkey. This first thing one should know is that donkeys are not reputed to be very intelligent. So being called a burro is not something to be proud of. Children, when learning their vowels in kindergarten, memorize this little ditty: “A-E-I-O-U: el burro sabe más que tú.” This means, literally, “A-E-I-O-U: an ass knows more than you,” after which the kids go wild with laughter.
One of the best dumb-donkey phrases is el burro que tocó la flauta. Now I’m not really up on my fables at this point, but I’ve always had the feeling that this must come from Aesop or someone along those lines. Maybe someone could e-mail me a clue as to its origin. But as for the saying itself, imagine the difficulty involved in a donkey playing the flute. What are the chances that music will be made if you put a flute in close proximity to a donkey? Probably about one in a million, or one in ten million, or one in a hundred million gazillion. So when someone with very little talent or intelligence says or does something remarkable, we say: “Fue el burro que tocó la flauta.”
Let’s look into this a little further: one doesn’t really have to be stupid to be called a donkey that plays the flute; sometimes it’s just a question of dumb luck. Say there is a poetry prize. One has to send in a poem about corruption in politics in order to win lunch at Los Pinos with the President, who is out to nip corruption in the bud. When our hero reads the announcement (the convocatoria), he feels inspired and rattles off on his computer ten or fifteen lines based on something he studied years ago in High School, but it works somehow. Now, he’d never written a line of verse in his life, but put in a novel situation while being inspired by memories of youth and ticked off at any one of seemingly infinite deeds of crass corruption, this guy came up with the best poem against the “c” word. And he won. Needless to say he never wrote another poem again, but he got to eat lunch with the Preciso (Mexican slang for the President.) He, as a poet, was el burro que tocó la flauta, not because he was stupid and made it — however briefly — in the big time, but because his feat was outside his general realm of action.
There are housewives or schoolteachers, for example, who have gotten a great idea to write a book, and the book — with a little help from a kind editor — turns into a super best seller. Even though they try to write a second, or a third, or a fourth novel, they can never quite match that first and unexpected stroke of genius: they are el burro que tocó la flauta.
Enough of musical burros. In English there is a saying that goes something like this: “That’s like the pot calling the kettle black.” We use it when one person criticizes another for something the first person is known for. Let’s say a shady politician calls an equally shady lawyer dishonest; well, that’s the pot calling the kettle black. In Spanish we say it’s el burro hablando de orejas, or “the donkey talking about [long] ears.” (One has to remember that donkeys are known for their long ears; this is understood without it having to be stated specifically.)
There is another saying in Spanish that means exactly the same thing but without the animal reference: el comal le dijo a la olla. The comal is a flat piece of round metal, traditionally used to heat tortillas. The olla is your everyday pot. Both tend to get black on the bottom because they are placed directly above the fire (or the flame in modern kitchens). So just imagine the comal telling the olla that it’s not clean…
You may remember the English saying, “The more the merrier.” Well there’s a similar Mexican saying, only that it means just the opposite: mientras menos burros, más olotes. Or, in other words, the fewer the donkeys, the more corncobs there are. (Donkeys supposedly are fond of corncobs, but I really have no idea.) So if there’s only so much of something good to go around, and someone says he or she is not interested, we’d come out with the mientras menos burros, más olotes comment.
Donkeys are also known in Mexico as evidence. I’ll explain: when someone says he’s sure that someone did something not exactly aboveboard, and that he has the evidence to prove it, he says: “Cuando digo que la burra es parda, es porque traigo los pelos en la mano.”
Next week we’ll continue with the burro and even more animals that tend to crop up in everyday speech.
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