A closer look
Shigeru Miyamoto named Nintendo's first massive arcade hit Donkey Kong because he genuinely believed that the English word for the animal was a direct synonym for stupid or stubborn and he wanted the ape to seem foolish, and when he presented the title to the American executives they basically laughed in his face but the eccentric name was already finalized and they had no time to change the marketing materials, so the entire world just accepted that a massive barrel-throwing gorilla who clearly is not a donkey at all would forever carry the title of a domesticated farm animal to cement a beautiful translation error into the permanent foundation of pop culture
