Etymology – Zebra Crossing
There was a practice when all the carts and public transport were stopped when the Britishers drove a car on the Indian roads.
The bus conductor would shout ‘Pleasure Car’ and the driver would stop the bus giving way to the whites. How arrogant does that sound?
Then came the brief era of using Zebras for carts instead of horses.
India is the only country that must have used Zebra carts for a brief time in history.
It was difficult to train, control, and maintain the Zebra, unlike the horse.
There were incidents where the Zebras disobeyed the cart driver and went amok threatening the shit out of the Britishers in the car.
The pleasure cars used to fearfully slow down for the cart to move just not to scare the animal and make him run amok.
For the first time the whites said ‘ slow down, it’s a Zebra crossing..!.’
Zebra humbled the British. – lol
This truly pissed them off and hence the practice of using Zebra on carts was banned.
For this humiliating reason or so the lexicographers never mentioned this as the etymological reason for the phrase ‘Zebra Crossing’ used today though the reminder is in ‘black and white’ pulled out of the beast and put laterally on the road for people to cross.
In the pic: Zebra cart in Calcutta sometime during the 1930s.
-Srirangam Ramesh