Kemo Sabe

Ke-mo sah-bee (/ˌkiːmoʊˈsɑːbiː/; often spelled kemo sabe or kemosabe) is the term of endearment used by the fictional American Indian sidekick Tonto in the American television and radio programs The Lone Ranger. It has become a common catchphrase.

Ultimately derived from gimoozaabi, an Ojibwe and Potawatomi word that may mean "he/she looks out in secret", it is sometimes translated as "trusty scout" or "faithful friend".

In the 2013 film The Lone Ranger, Tonto states that it means "wrong brother" in Comanche, a seemingly tongue-in-cheek translation within the context of the plot.

Fran Striker, writer of the original Lone Ranger radio program, spelled the word "ke-mo sah-bee." However, the spelling kemo sabe (or kemosabe) is by far the most common in popular culture, receiving approximately 1,440,000 hits on Google search in June 2014, as opposed to ke-mo sah-bee's 29,700.

There are many theories about the origin and meaning of this word. A common story is that it derives from a Spanish phrase such as "¿Quién sabe?" or "quien no sabe," meaning "Who knows?" or "he who does not know". This is implausible because Jim Jewell, director of The Lone Ranger from 1933 to 1939, took the phrase from Kamp Kee-Mo Sah-Bee, a boys' camp on Mullett Lake in Michigan, established by Charles W. Yeager (Jewell's father-in-law) in 1916. Yeager himself probably took the term from Ernest Thompson Seton, one of the founders of the Boy Scouts of America, who had given the meaning "scout runner" to Kee-mo-sah'-bee in his 1912 book "The Book of Woodcraft and Indian Lore".

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Wikipedia