44 Years of Stuff: "Life of Brian" Bumper Sticker

It was Friday, August 17, 1979, and one of the movie theaters in Westwood had thrown down the gauntlet; the first 100 people who came to see the first showing of "Monty Python's Life of Brian" on its opening day would receive a free T-shirt and bumper sticker. Heck, that alone was worth more than the inflated $5 we had to pay to go see a movie "over the hill."

A friend of mine and I were not about to let the fact that we were still a year away from driving age deter us from such a prize. So we got on our bicycles in the Valley and pedaled almost nine miles over Benedict Canyon in the hot August summer. I remember what a great relief it was to coast down the other side on the way to Westwood, and how some stiffness had already set into my muscles when the movie ended and we had to go back. I can't believe we took our bikes through such a dangerous pass, especially now that I know how aggressive things can get trying to drive a car through there as an adult. But I got my sticker, and the accompanying cheap tan T-shirt with a black-and-white "Life of Brian" poster shot ironed on to the front. I'm sure that's around here somewhere, too.

Winnetka, Land of Mystery

A friend of mine has become obsessed with Winnetka, the name of a main street and town in our corner of the county, since he heard it was a Native American word meaning “beautiful land” and after it became the freeway exit to his home. Since the same freeway used to be a passageway for the Chumash Indians, he also wondered if “winnetka” might be Chumash. Being a fan of place names and etymology myself, I thought it would be fun to look into it.

It turns out Winnetka’s origins aren’t local at all, but rather in Illinois, where the town of Winnetka was incorporated in 1869. Beyond that there doesn’t seem to be any solid consensus on anything. The Winnetka Historical Society attributes the word to a Native American phrase meaning “beautiful land” that town founder Charles Peck’s wife Sarah supposedly read in a book, adding that “the source of this phrase has never been discovered.”

A dubious Wikipedia entry citing the WHS posits that “no language has been found with a word anything resembling both Winnetka and the definition.” The Village of Winnetka website states as fact that it’s a Native American word meaning “beautiful land.” The Encyclopedia Brittanica entry hedges, saying the word is “thought” to be derived from a Native American dialect.

Only the L.A. Times cites an actual tribe, claiming in a 1998 town profile that Winnetka is a Potawatomi word for “beautiful place,” an idea also put forth (and possibly derived from) an entry on MSN’s Encarta that says “probably.” (And yes, that’s the same Potawatomi Indians immortalized in the Tigers of Instantaneous Death song “Dowagiac.”)

That’s plausible, since the Potawatomi were known to live in Illinois (Winnetka is 10 miles away from the Potawatomi Woods). They could also be found in Kansas, and the Kansas Heritage Group’s helpful Potawatomi Dictionary translates “beauty” and “earth” (the closest thing I could find to “beautiful land”) as “we’onuk kik.” We’onuk-kik. Winnetka. Hmmm.

Then there’s UCLA Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Anthropology William Bright, who states rather professorially in his book “Native American Placenames of the United States”: “The name is apparently an artificial coinage from elements in various Algonquian languages, including SNEng [sic]. Algonquian ‘beautiful’ (Vogel 1963). The placename also occurs in Calif. (Los Angeles, CA) and Minnesota (Hennepin Co.).”

So which is it? Potawatomi? Multiple Algonquian? Sarah Peck’s pidgin Indian? Unsourceable? Beautiful land? Magnificent feast? More importantly, how can so many different takes on the origin of one word co-exist in an authoritative context? It seems that not only is the erosion of truth inevitable but insurmountable.

UPDATE: Thanks to an anonymous reader for the following additional info:

Wenet- means it is good looking. Ka could come from ke- earth or sometimes pronounced ki-
ki with a k means at on or near a location. It is called locative.

In Potawatomi there is an animate or living word and inanimate non living word for most things. So Wenet- is is inanimate while wenze- he/she is beautiful.

Wenek- is a different form of the same word.