WHAT IS A “FLAPPER?”

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVIII, Issue 21, 6 January 1928, Page 5

WHAT IS A “FLAPPER?”

THE “PERFECT DEFINITION.” Lady Findlay, the newly-elected president of the Scottish Unionist Conference, searched the dictionaries to find the origin “of that derogatory and abominable term of ‘flapper.’ ” During a bright debate on the vote for women of 21, she said she thought in her innocence that it meant girls whose hair flapped on their shoulders. "But that definition,” she went on, “cannot apply to women of 21, for their hair would be either coiled round their heads or. in the case of the modern young woman, cut off. “The next definition I found—l scarcely like to say it—was that of a little duck. “I went to the highest authority. Murray’s Oxford Dictionary, and here I found the perfect definition. The classical use of the word is to be found in 'Gulliver’s Travels.’ We are told that flappers were used ro arouse the attention and jog the> memory of people who from absorutiCel of any interests, paid insufficient attention to what was going on around them.”