A wailing banshee is in Irish folklore a spirit in the form of a woman----often beautiful but sometimes an old hag----who appears to or is heard by members of a family as a warning that one of them will soon die. Banshee is from the Gaelic bean sidhe, "woman of the fairies", and "wailing like a banshee" has come to mean someone, especially a woman, screaming shrilly.
"Where Have All the Flowers Gone?"
Antiwar song written annd popularized by Pete Seeger in 1961. It is an elegiac lament for the young boys gone to war, "gone to graveyards everywhere", and for the women they left behind. It was inspired by a passage from Mikhail Sholokhov's novel "And Quiet Flows the Don" . It became a hit record done by the Kingston Trio under the Capitol label. The phrase has a dying cadence and is used to bemoan the disappearance of fragile things and people, somewhat akin to teh refrain of Villon: "Where are the snows of yesteryear"?
Wonder Woman:
Appearing on the comic book scene in 1942, Wonder Woman was later hailed by feminists as an embodiment of some of their tenets. It was sharply condemned by such critics as Dr. Frederic Wertham, who, in his "Sedcution of the Innocent" (1954), took it to task for being one of the most harmful crime comics. Originally, Wonder Woman was an Amazon princess who lived on Paradise Island. No men were permitted on the Island. Wonder Woman came to America to help win World War 2. Clad in a flashy red, white, blue and yellow costume, she performed her fantastic feats. She was virtually all-powerful-----unless a man linked together her " bracelets of submission".
Femal readers simply identified with Wonder Woman, the super heroine, just as the male readers were drawn to Superman. Psychological experts of all sorts, however, had a field day with Wonder Woman, claiming to find in the comic book evidences of lesbianism and sadomasochism.
WASP:
A disparaging acronym for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, WASP has been commonly used in America since the early 1960's to describe the nation's "ruling class", who are supposed to be white, of British descent, Protestant and waspish, too. During World War II, WASP was also an acronym for Women's Auxilliary Service Pilot.
Waterloo:
One who meets his Waterloo, suffers a complete and final defeat, just as Napolean did in 1815 at the Battle of Waterloo, about nine miles from Brussels in Belgium.
