#KEYMO MEANING IN ENGLISH TV#
On a 1969 episode of The Johnny Carson Show, Carson did a sketch in which he interviewed Jay Silverheels-who portrayed Tonto on the Lone Ranger TV series-in character, for a new job at NBC. Kendall herself decided she preferred “the mystery to certainty,” and perhaps the word is indeed a bit more fun that way. In the nearly 40 years since Kendall’s piece was published, no one seems to have come any closer to a conclusive account of the phrase’s origins or intended meaning within the Lone Ranger series. According to Shaterian, a typical Yavapai speaker would answer with kinmasaba or kinmasabeh. Striker, Shaterian says, could have visited a reservation in the state and asked people there what their word was for “a white person,” or someone who dresses in white, like the Lone Ranger.
Alan Shaterian of University of California, Berkeley told Kendall that the word could have its roots in the Yavapai language spoken in Arizona. There’s one other theory of note, though it’s not as well known as the first two. “It’s always going to be an antagonistic relationship between indigenous people and the colonial people,” he added. “ They were calling each other ‘idiot’ all those years,” he told an interviewer in 1996, a few years after the publication of his story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Native American writer Sherman Alexie, who is of Coeur D’Alene descent, has said that kemosabe means “idiot” in Apache. But the theory has plenty of proponents regardless. As Chadwick Allen explains in “Hero with Two Faces: The Lone Ranger as Treaty Discourse,” this interpretation has mostly been pushed by American linguists who want to “locate Tonto ‘appropriately’ in the Pueblo southwest,” and there isn’t much evidence for it.
Is the Lone Ranger a racist who calls his partner an idiot? Is Tonto in turn being subversive when he addresses his white companion as an ignoramus? Noting that tonto in Spanish means “stupid” or “crazy,” some people have pointed out that kemosabe sounds a lot like the Spanish phrase quien no sabe, “he who doesn’t understand.” (In Spanish-language versions of The Lone Ranger, Tonto is called Toro, Spanish for bull.) This suggests a whole different dynamic between the two characters. There is another theory that gives the word an entirely different meaning.
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