CHAT: Kemosabe=gimoozaabi?
| From: | Ed Heil <edheil@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, June 3, 1999, 21:14 |
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There was a column about this in the Straight Dope
(www.straightdope.com). It explains what is known about the origins
of "Kemosabe" and "Tonto":
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/970718.html
(Ed's notes: the camp mentioned was less than ten miles from
where I grew up, interestingly enough. Never heard of it though.
Before my time. My mom, who listened faithfully to the radio
serial of The Lone Ranger, thought that the TV version was a
candy-ass pipsqueak [not her precise words, I admit] compared
to the man she had imagined to go with the radio voice.)
Dear Cecil:
If you would return with us to those thrilling days of
yesteryear, you might recall that Tonto, the faithful
Indian companion to the Lone Ranger, called his boss
"kemosabe." I heard somewhere that kemosabe was the word,
in some Native American tongue, for chicken sh--uh, guano.
Considering the Lone Ranger's habit of sending Tonto into
town to get information, and the townspeople's habit of
beating the stuffing out of Tonto while the Lone Ranger
was back in camp, this translation could make sense.
I suspect, however, that kemosabe was the creation of some
scriptwriter or the creator of the Lone Ranger stories. Jay
Silverheels is no longer with us to tell, and would Clayton
Moore know?
Unca Cece, since you are a fighter for Truth, and for all
I know, Justice and the American Way too, please tell us
the Straight Dope! --Rngrjeff, via AOL
Dear Jeff:
A fighter for Truth, Justice, and the American Way--boy,
I've really got you guys trained, don't I?
As for Jay Silverheels and Clayton Moore ... c'mon, Jeff,
get with the program--the radio program, which is where
the Lone Ranger originated. It all began in 1932 on
Detroit's WXYZ, where owner George W. Trendle was trying
to develop a hit show to keep his station afloat during the
Depression. According to _Who Was That Masked Man? The
Story of the Lone Ranger_ (1981) by David Rothel, Trendle
had the basic idea for a Western with a Zorro-like hero.
WXYZ staff brainstormed the key elements of the Lone Ranger's
shtick, including the mask, the white horse, the signature
line "Hi-yo, Silver, away!" and of course the name
"Lone Ranger." Hokey, sure, but it worked. The show quickly
became popular and soon was heard nationwide.
The term kemosabe--there are lots of spellings, but this
one's as good as any--seems to have been the contribution
of Jim Jewell, who directed "The Lone Ranger" (and another
famous serial, The Green Hornet) until 1938. In an interview
with Rothel, Jewell said he'd lifted the term from the name
of a boys' camp at Mullet Lake, just south of Mackinac,
Michigan, called Kamp Kee-Mo Sah-Bee. The camp had been
established in 1911 by Jewell's father-in-law, Charles
Yeager, and operated until about 1940. Translation of
kee-mo sah-bee, according to Jewell: "trusty scout."
We know Kamp Kee-Mo Sah-Bee existed because we have
photos and newspaper clippings to prove it. (Actually
David Rothel has the photos and clippings, but we've
taken a proprietary interest in this.) What about the
translation, though? No disrespect to Yeager, but just
because some wily Amerind told him it meant "trusty
scout" doesn't mean we can rule out "chicken guano."
We consulted the nation's Native American language
experts. (Yeah, they're mostly white folks too, but
we figured the wily Amerinds couldn't be BS'ing all
of them.) Initial investigations into variations of
"trusty" turned up nothing. But then Rob Malouf, a
grad student in linguistics at Stanford, had a
brainstorm: "According to John Nichols' Concise
Dictionary of Minnesota Ojibwe, the Ojibwe word
giimoozaabi means `to peek' (it could also mean `he
peeks' or `he who peeks').
"He who peeks"? Sounds like something you'd get
arraigned for in Perverts' Court. But Rob continued:
"There are several words with the same prefix [giimooj,
secretly] meaning things like `to sneak up on
someone'.... It is quite plausible that giimoozaabi
means something like `scout'.... Giimoozaabi is
pronounced pretty much the same as kemosabe and would
have been spelled `Kee Moh Sah Bee' at the turn of the
century." Bingo.
After further consultation with Indian language expert
Laura Buszard-Welcher, we've established that Kamp
Kee-Mo Sah-Bee was in an area inhabited by the Ottawa,
who spoke a dialect of Ojibwe with the same word
giimoozaabi. There were also Potawatomi in the region
who spoke a closely related language with a similar word.
So while the "trusty" part may have been hype, kemosabe
probably really was a Native American term for "scout."
Let's see, what else? How about Tonto? According to
Jim Jewell, there was an Indian storyteller at Kamp
Kee-Mo Sah-Bee who would get rowdy when drunk, leading
the other Indians to call him "tonto." The commonly told
story is that this is Potawatomi for "wild one."
Buszard-Welcher, who knows about these things, says not so.
Alternative theories are that tonto is Spanish for
"fool," or that Lone Ranger scriptwriter Fran Striker
transmuted the name Gobo, a character in an earlier serial.
Sorry we can't give you the definitive answer, but have
patience. We chip away at the unknown one word at a time.
--CECIL ADAMS
Ed Heil ------ edheil@postmark.net
--- http://purl.org/net/edheil ---
Nik Taylor wrote:
> John Cowan wrote:
> > that hasn't stopped various people from *retconning* etymologies
> > from various Amerindian languages.
>=20
> Hmm, I'd heard that it was from Spanish "qui=E9n no sabe", but your
> account does make more sense.
>=20
> --=20
> "It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose fathe=
r