cowabunga
This enthusiastic exclamation of surfers has its roots in children’s television programming of the 1950s. Cowabunga, or Kawabonga, was originally used by the character Chief Thunderthud on the Howdy Doody Show.
From Harvey Kurtzman’s Inside Mad of 1955:
Gosharootie ... I mean Kowabunga, Clarabella! ... Kowabunga! Him got a woman’s name!
(Clarabell the clown was another character on Howdy Doody and this appears to be a reference to the show.)
In 1975, “Buffalo Bob” Smith, host of the show, explained where the term came from:
As far as I know, our Howdy Doody writer, Eddie Kean “made up” the word Kawabonga—which Chief Thunderthud used when things were bad. When he was happy he said another original(?) word, Kawagoopa.
(Sources: Historical Dictionary of American Slang; American Speech, Vol. 55, No. 4. (Winter, 1980), pp. 264-277)
Copyright 1997-2008, by David Wilton
