Appendix talk:Etymology/cowabunga

Origin
The claims of pre-Howdy Doody Show etymology are baseless for several reasons: This is almost certainly either an urban legend or trolling. Forbes72 (talk) 05:57, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Text claimed "modern linguists" support the etemology, but cite a certain H.L. Orbach. Looking up the actual conference cited, you can work out Orbach is from Kansas State Univeristy, and is clearly an Anthropologist/Sociologist, not a linguist. The only other published material about him I could find concerned aging.
 * 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
 * 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.