Where’s Your Happy Place?
Celebrating History
What’s in a Name?
by Hattie Beresford
James Madison Alden was the artist for the US Coast Survey of the Pacific Coast in the 1850s. He painted this view labeled “Valley of Montecito…” in 1855, one of the earliest visual records of the area.
L
Locally owned and operated for over 40 years 14 State Street | 805-962-0049 | Mon-Sunday 10-5
8
ongtime Montecito resident J’Amy Brown contacted me the other day distressed by the current belief that the town’s name means “little mountain.” Maria Herold, late archivist of the Montecito Association History Committee, and David Myrick, author of the two-volume history Montecito and Santa Barbara, “must be rolling in their graves!” said J’Amy. Having known Maria, I believe she would have found it to be a nice idea, and not at all silly. But then Maria was quite a hussy as well as a historian, and didn’t believe that the “little mountain” meaning was awful at all. I, too, don’t believe it is egregious to the history of the place, but then Maria and I know history, and we know about semantic change and shifts in denotation and connotation over time. For instance, several hundred years ago the above paragraph would have meant something entirely different. For starters, a nice idea then would have been a silly, foolish, and simple idea. Whereas not being silly, would have meant not being worthy. I haven’t insulted Maria by calling her a hussy, only identified her as a housewife, and by saying the meaning wasn’t awful, I’m saying, in the parlance of 300 years ago, that it inspired no awe. As for “egregious,” well, that once meant distinguished or eminent, which the current definition as applied to the town certainly is not. While I have no ability to go into the Provincial Records and find references to the naming of El Montecito, I do know that it wasn’t bestowed by the first Spaniards to traverse Alta California with the Portola Expedition in 1769. They were a name calling bunch and named Carpinteria and many of the canyons along the Gaviota Coast, which still bear these old monikers. The Santa Barbara Presidio was founded in 1782, and by then the name “Montecito” was in use for the area we know today. In fact, it was there that the Spanish originally planned to build the mission. So, what did montecito mean in 1782? To know that, one must get to the root of the problem, which is the word monte, the suffix -cito being a diminutive. Today, though “mountain” is the most common definition, there are other meanings. They include scrubland; wood or forestland; meadow or pastureland; countryside; and as slang for marijuana. (Hmmm, that latter definition bodes nicely for the village.) Which brings us to the California town of El Monte, which, like Montecito, is not built on a mountain, small or otherwise. The editors of The Encyclopædia Britannica say that the Spanish missionaries and soldiers who inhabited the area in the 18th century, named it for its meadows, an archaic sense of the word monte. Isn’t it likely, therefore, that these self-same missionaries and soldiers had that meaning in mind when they named Montecito? After all, the missionaries would not have considered placing a mission on a mountain; they weren’t Tibetan monks, after all. Rather they would have chosen fertile lands near a steady stream of water and with a goodly supply of wood for construction and heating. The problem with looking up 300-year-old Spanish words in 2020 dictionaries is that meanings change over time. Further confusion ensues with regional differences in meaning. Anyway, since Montecito is not on a mountain, but at the foot of them, it is obvious that the name doesn’t mean “little mountain.” It makes much more sense that in 1782, el montecito referred to the countryside with its grasslands and wooded glades. The only way to possibly know for sure, however, is to access the early records, which were written in now archaic Spanish. In the meantime, though this senile controversy provides an interesting distraction, we probably have more important things to think about. Hopefully it will all soon fizzle out – look it up. •MJ (Sources: https://ideas.ted.com/20-words-that-once-meant-something-very-different/; various Spanish to English definition websites; https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/61876/11-words-meanings-have-changed-drastically-over-time)
MONTECITO JOURNAL
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” – Oscar Wilde
20 – 27 August 2020