Who knows how many times in life we have expressed ourselves with a “Wow!” to express surprise and wonder. But where does it come from? this curious three-letter onomatopoeic interjection that is also found in comics and films? From Scottish Gaelic well well from the distant sixteenth century, and already then the expression indicated amazement and incredulity.
The first time that “wow” appeared on paper, however, dates back to a 1513 translation of Virgil’s Aeneid in which its Scottish translator wrote in one of the lines:
Out on thir wanderand spiritis, wow! (…)
That first “wow!” would have been the shortened version of I vow (well well), a Scottish Gaelic expression of amazement. The word then spread to the English as well, and became famous thanks to the American slang of the 1920s. At the time it was understood as a noun: for example, you could say “This dish is a wow!” to mean that it was truly delicious. But with the famous television series Happy Days returns to being an exclamation as in its origins, and becomes popular in the USA and Europe thanks to the character of Arthur Fonzarelli who used this exclamation very often. His legendary «Wow!» – Italianized with “uau” – contributed to making the character of unforgettable Fonzie.
Over time this word has become part of the vocabulary of many languagesalways maintaining its meaning of surprise or wonder. If you don’t like it very much, you can always use “pazzesco!” or similar. After all, in other cultures, people don’t always say “wow”, but expressions of amazement like Oh my God (English), or Good blood (French), and Caramba (Spanish), just to name a few famous ones.
Why “wow”: a simple question of nature
The way in which the human being articulates the “w” it’s very easy, that’s why it’s one of the first letters produced when he’s still little. We can therefore say that the word “wow” is a natural exclamation for our speciesbut it also has to do with our facial expressions and the way we curve our lips when we are surprised. In those moments it is spontaneous to make our mouth take the shape of an “o”, and pronounce a “woooo” or a “wow”.
Although linguists attribute its origin to Scottish, the onomatopoeia that uses this letter to express wonder is very similar in many other languages, which is why the naturalness of this sound is confirmed. Just to give some examples, in Spanish we say “wow!” (in some areas supplanted by the expression “Go!” or, as previously stated “Wow!“), in Russian “Bay!” (pronounced “vau”) and in Korean “와우” (pronounced “wau”).
The “Wow!” Signal
Not everyone knows that the “Wow Signal!” exists, a sort of call received in August 1977 by theOhio State University Observatorywhich at the time seemed to attest to evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. This is because the modulation of that frequency was such as to suggest the existence of intelligent life.
The narrow-band radio signal (lasting 72 seconds) was named so because the astronomer Jerry R. Ehman who detected it via radio telescope was so incredulous and amazed by its intensity that he searched for the corresponding alphanumeric code on the printed sheet with the red markerand wrote a “Wow!” of amazement next to it.
Ehman and his collaborators later tried to obtain other signals, but without success. Many hypotheses have been made about this, but so far the origin of this signal has not been discovered.
