Word: wowser
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...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...
...affectionately reprint his own editorials and funny stories, who can, in the Southern journalist's equivalent of Arthur Kober, refer to a "floundered" submarine, speaks from the photographic heart of what his time and environment have made him, and is incapable of going wrong. Even such a wowser as: "Whatever else North Carolinians stand for or do not stand for, immorality by a man in the highest place in an insane asylum or even the suspicion of it brings indignation," is better than a mere laugh; it is, like the whole of the book, as genuine as a thumbprint...