COWABUNGA

Originally written kowa-bunga or Kawabonga; now also cowabunga interjection (Youth Culture) In young people's slang (originally in the US), an exclamation of exhilaration or satisfaction, or sometimes a rallying cry to action: yippee!, yahoo!, yabbadabba doo! Etymology: The word was originally used in the fifties (in the form kowa-bunga or Kawabonga) as an exclamation of anger by the cartoon character Chief Thunderthud in The Howdy Doody Show, written by Eddie Kean. By the sixties, it had entered surfing slang as a cry of exhilaration when riding the crest of a wave. Since the surfers of the sixties had been the children for whom The Howdy Doody Show was written, it is easy to see how the word made this transition; it is less clear how Eddie Kean came upon it. Chief Thunderthud used the expression when annoyed, or if something went wrong; when things went well, he said Kawagoopa. Although Thunderthud was meant to be an American Indian, there had been early speculation that cowabunga might come from the Australian or South Seas surfing world; interestingly, kauwul is recorded as an aboriginal word in New South Wales for 'big', bong for 'death', and gubba for 'good', but this is surely no more than a curious coincidence. History and Usage: As mentioned above, Cowabunga was in use as an exclamation among Californian surfers by the sixties. It reached a wider audience through a series of films about a surfer called Gidget in the sixties, through its use by the cookie monster in the children's television series Sesame Street in the seventies, and more particularly from 1990, when it was taken up as the rallying cry of the Teenage Mutant Turtles. In the book of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: the Movie, the turtles are searching for a suitable cry: They turned to Donatello, who struggled to come up with the perfect word to describe their exploits. But Donatello was at a loss. His brothers continued to top each other: 'Tubular!' 'Radical!' 'Dynamite!' At last Splinter raised a finger and brought an end to the debate. 'I have always liked', he said quietly, 'cowabunga.' The turtles stared at him, grinning, then laid down high-threes all around. 'Cow-a-bung-a!' they cried in unison. And the battle-cry was born. The word soon crossed the Atlantic as part of turtlemania, with the result that one could hear the cry of 'Cowabunga, dudes!' from British children apparently unaware that, as far as their parents were concerned, they were speaking a foreign language. 'Hey, Mike, I didn't know that you could drive!' 'Me neither...cowabunga!' Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles 10-23 Feb. 1990, p. 20 Marketers are betting that youngsters will have the same reaction as American kids: Cowabunga! Newsweek 16 Apr. 1990, p. 61