Appendix talk:Etymology/cowabunga

Origin

The claims of pre-Howdy Doody Show etymology are baseless for several reasons:

• Text claimed "modern linguists" support the etemology, but cite a certain H.L. Orbach. Looking up the actual conference cited [1], you can work out Orbach is from Kansas State Univeristy, and is clearly an Anthropologist/Sociologist, not a linguist.[2] The only other published material about him I could find concerned aging. [3]
• Citation is in the "book" format, but actually points to a poster session at a conference- there's no evidence I can find of actual published paper here.
• "Ancient Native American" is clearly not a phrase a linguist would use- an expert would cite a specific language or language family, and calling a language "ancient" feeds directly into a common misconception about how languages change over time. I'm not the first to point this out on wiktionary [4]
• The passage calls it an "exclamation", but does not define its meaning, usage or context at all, including its time of use, location, or any detail at all.

This is almost certainly either an urban legend or trolling. Forbes72 (talk) 05:57, 5 October 2017 (UTC)