Word: wowser
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Sample wowser...
...soldiers found that their high-school books were right: Australia's fauna was indeed teeming with strange cases of arrested evolution. There, sure enough, were the duck-billed platypus, the kangaroo, the dingo dog. There was another one that the zoology writers had left out. He was the "wowser," strangest beastie of them...
...wowser is human. The Australian slang dictionary defines him (or her) as "a puritanical enthusiast, a bluestocking, a drab-souled Philistine haunted by the mockery of others." What the U.S. soldiers and their Empire mates have to say about him would burn holes in a postman's sack...
...worst feature of the wowser is that he is not content to spend his Sundays drably in sedate strolls or in solemn indoor sportlessness. He wants everyone else to be Sunday-drab, too. And for soldiers who are working like horses six days a week to save the wowser and his friends from the Jap, that is something to howl about...
Last week the wowsers melted a little around the edges. They agreed that recreation buildings for soldiers might be opened on Sundays, say from 2:30 to 6 p.m. and from 8:15 to 10:30. (The rest of the day is for church.) But they raised a wowsing quibble. Since this vast breach in the law was for soldiers, they wondered whether it would be wowser-fair to let the soldiers' girls in. The girls are civilians...