More on Tonto

[Joel S. Berson]

I notice in today's NYTimes that one of the films in "The 2007
Academy Award Nominated Short Films" (opening nationwide today) is
called "The Tonto Woman" (live-action).  This British film is a
western where the title character is "the socially outcast wife of a
rancher" "[k]idnapped by Mojave Indians" [reviewer's words].

I am led to think that the Tonto and Mojave Indians were not friendly
to each other, and so wonder why she is called a "Tonto woman."  But
that's all I know, folks, either about the Indians or the movie.

Joel

At 2/15/2008 11:34 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>The Straight Dope: http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_061.html
>
>
>   Personally - and remember how gullible I am - it's hard for me to
> believe that somebody intentionally named the LR's savior and
> associate "Lunkhead" or something similar.  Because if he had, I'd
> expect that the character would have been portrayed as a butt or
> buffoon, which he wasn't.  I'd also expect him to have been a
> Mexican Sancho Panza type, not a Native American.
>
>   My SWAG is that whoever named "Tonto" was thinking, perhaps
> unconsciously, of the Tonto Basin, which is not only on maps but
> also provided the title for Zane Grey's story "The Tonto Basin,"
> published in 1922.  He also wrote the novel _Under the Tonto Rim_
> (1926). So "Tonto" was a catchy Western name, already hallowed by
> ZG before 1931.  "Lunkhead" connections are _at least as likely_ to
> be _post facto_ (not to mention "postmodern").
>
>   I don't know if the LR's adventures were supposed to take place
> primarily in Arizona, but the scenery of the TV show (and the
> godawful 1981 movie) was mostly desert - perhaps owing to budgetary
> constraints.
>
>   JL
>
>Gregory McNamee <gm at GREGORYMCNAMEE.COM> wrote:
>   ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
>Sender: American Dialect Society
>Poster: Gregory McNamee
>Subject: Re: does anyone need another example of positive ANYMORE?
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Some standard sources--I'll hunt up references, but one is an
>autobiography by a Yavapai (Kekwevaya) Indian scout that I've been
>editing--say that "Tonto," meaning stupid or foolish, was an insult
>given to an Apache band that allowed Spanish types to pass through
>unharmed, rather than attack them at once. Other sources (see
>http://spot.colorado.edu/~koontz/faq/etymology.htm
>, e.g.) say that "Tonto" is a gloss for what the Chiricahua Apaches
>called that group, a phrase meaning "wild people." The high-pitched
>business is, I'm betting, yet another of Wikipedia's many inventions,
>which is a natural consequence of the encyclopedia anyone can edit.
>
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