In Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, one phrase started me on a computer search: “… a motley collection of citizens and soldiers and reduced Indians or tontos as their brothers outside the gates would name them.” Is the name "Tonto" derogatory, and was its use in the Lone Ranger television series intentionally demeaning to Native Americans?There is no entry for "tonto" in either the OED or its supplement, probably because, as noted in Websters, the word (usually capitalized, but McCarthy often eschews caps, as well as quotation marks) is [AmerSp, fr. Sp., fool, fr tonto foolish]. So McCarthy is using the term appropriately - how about the Lone Ranger TV series? For that, I turned to (where else) Wiki:
in Portuguese, Italian and Spanish, the word "Tonto" means "fool" or "idiot" (although this appears to have been a coincidence, as the character is depicted as intelligent), so the name was changed in the dubbed versions. In some Spanish speaking countries, he was named "Toro", which means "bull."Before leaving the subject, these other tidbits -
This was by far the highest-rated television program on the ABC network in the early 1950s and its first true "hit".
The radio series identified Tonto as a chief's son in the Potawatomi nation. His name translates as wild one in his own language. For the most part, the Potawatomi did not live in the Southwestern states, and their cultural costume is different from that worn by Tonto. The choice to make Tonto a Potawatomi seems to come from station owner George Trendle's youth in Michigan. This is the traditional territory of the Potawatomi.
The phrase kemo sabe was coined by co-creator James Jewell; his father-in-law ran a camp named Ke-Moh-Sah-Bee in Michigan, and he understood the word to mean "trusty scout". Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope confirmed with linguists that "kemosabe" could plausibly be an Ojibwe word (giimoozaabi) for "scout
(image credit here)
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