“Wowser”

I mentioned in the previous post that in his book The American Language, H.L. Mencken listed “pub-crawl” as a “Briticism” that had not caught on in America. Another one he mentions is “wowser.” In the 1936 edition, Mencken calls this “an excellent noun” of Australian origin and provides a definition: “a fellow who is too niggardly of joy to allow the other fellow any time to do anything but pray.” Mencken goes on: “I tried to introduce it in the United States after World War I, but without any success.”

That surprised me. I would have thought “wowser” had indeed found success in America. And in fact it did, but only after 1936, and with a different meaning.

But first, as to the Miss Grundy-type “wowser,” Mencken was correct, though incomplete. The OED confirms Australian origin and has a citation from a Sydney newspaper in 1900: “That old Y.M.C.A. wowser, whose journalistic virtue is of such transparent Sir Galahad-like purity.”

The word has traveled to New Zealand by 1910 as witness this parliamentary exchange:

It had spread to Britain by 1917, appearing in The Woman of the Horizon by Gilbert Frankau, the passage containing a helpful explanation of its meaning:

Mencken did not seem to be aware that the word had another, seemingly earlier, meaning, found strictly in Australia. In the OED‘s words, “A person, esp. a man, who behaves in an antisocial or disruptive way; a lout; a yob.” This appeared as early as 1898 but seems to have died out by the 1930s (even as the puritanical “wowser” persisted in Australia and Britain into the 21st century).

As for the American “wowser,” it derives from the exclamation “Wow!,” which originated in Scotland but flourished in America starting around the turn of the 20th century, as in this exchange from a book by George Ade, a virtuoso of slang: “‘The girls—wow!’ ‘Beauties, eh?’ ‘Lollypaloozers!’” Green’s Dictionary of Slang defines this “wowser” as “something, or somebody, impressive, sensational, successful.” The dictionary has citations from 1917 and 1924, which I’m a bit dubious about, and a solid one from a 1951 novel: “[She] Certainly was a wowser on that Gay Nineties stuff.”

I found an earlier example, using newspapers.com, in a 1940 sports article in the North Adams [Massachusetts] Transcript. It’s about a baseball pitcher who had been playing in the minor leagues, or “circuits”:

An interesting thing about American “wowser” (sometimes spelled “wowzer”) is that even though it probably didn’t exist before the 1936 (else Mencken would have noted it), very soon it acquired an old-fashioned sound. Consider that 1951 quote, referring to the 1890s. And its second appearance in the New York Times (following a 1964 book review) was in a fanciful article that purported to be about the 1927 New York Yankees season and to be written in the style of the time. The owner of the team “had a wowser of a promotional idea, which he plastered on billboards all over the city: Babe Ruth promising to break his 1921 record of 59 homers ‘or apologize in person to each and every disappointed Yankee rooter!'”

I believe the sense of “wowser” as coming from the Jazz Age derives from its sounding like another word, which did. Green’s categorizes “yowza” as “US teen” argot and defines it as “a general excl., either of approval or of vaguely non-committal agreement.” The first citation, which seems to be either a definition or a repetition, is from the Philadelphia Daily Bulletin in 1933: “Yowza–Yes sir!”

The word, repeated three times, became associated with the bandleader Ben Bernie, who had a nationally syndicated radio show in the ’30s. It was adopted by the malevolent bandleader played by Gig Young in the 1969 film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, which is where I first encountered it. Wikipedia notes that the word was also picked up by “Richie Cunningham in a 1976 episode of Happy Days, ‘They Shoot Fonzies, Don’t They?’, by the band Chic with their 1977 hit ‘Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah),’ Frank Zappa in his 1979 single ‘Dancin’ Fool‘ and Ritch Brinkley as Cappy in 1994’s comedy Cabin Boy.”

Did American “wowser” spring from “yowza”? My guess would be yes, but more research is clearly called for.