If you’re gung-ho about something, you’re extremely enthusiastic, possibly to the point of being stupid or annoying. But did you know it has its origins in China? Let’s get gung-ho about gung-ho. Sorry.
‘Gung-ho’ comes from the Chinese phrase ‘gōnghé’ meaning ‘work together’ which is short for ‘gōngyè hézuòshè’ (工業合作社), meaning, rather uninspiringly, ‘industrial cooperative’. The full phrase refers to the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives, organisations established in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) to support the country’s war effort. They organised unemployed workers and refugees to work together to increase production. In the 1930s, a US Marine commander called Lieutenant Colonel Evans F Carlson spent some time in China observing these operations. He was so impressed by how enthusiastic the workers were, and how well they worked together, that he adopted the term ‘gung-ho’ as a motto for his Marine Raiders a few years later. From there, it spread throughout the US Marine Corps, where it was used as an expression of spirit (whatever that means), and then into American society as a whole. ‘Gung-ho’ was firmly cemented into English when it was used as the title of a 1943 war film about the 2nd Raider Battalion’s 1942 raid on Makin Island, which was led by Carlson.
‘Gung-ho’ is a great example of a foreign word being adopted into English with a completely different (by which I mean completely wrong) meaning. According to the linguist Albert Moe, in Chinese, ‘…this is neither a slogan nor a battle cry; it is only a name for an organization’.