By Ed Rogers
Reading about the phrase “in the belly of the beast” got me to thinking about the first time I heard the phrase “gung ho.” It was in boot camp at Fort Riley Kansas. I even remember the month: January. It was part of the cadence used to try to run us to death, and it became part of the language of military life.
“He’s a gung ho bastard”No one ever said what it meant. We were free to apply it wherever and whenever we felt like it.
“You don’t have to be so damn gung ho about it.”
“Fuck that gung ho bullshit.”
I seem to have some memory of its being a Japanese phrase from WWII. I don’t know if I made that up or someone told me. It became so ingrained that I, like most ex-soldiers, used it long after we were discharged.
Here is what I assume to be the reliably true story, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
Gung ho is an English term used to mean “enthusiastic" or “overzealous."
Gung ho is an anglicised pronunciation of “gōng hé” (工合), which is also sometimes anglicised as “kung ho.” “Gōng hé” is a shortened version of the term “gōngyè hézuòshè” (工業合作社) or Chinese Industrial Cooperatives[, whose best known legacy in the English-speaking world is perhaps the transliteration Gung-ho].
The two Chinese characters “gōng” and “hé” are translatable individually as “work" and “together.”
The linguist Albert Moe studied both the origin and the usage [of “gung ho”] in English. He concludes that the term is an “Americanism that is derived from the Chinese, but its several accepted American meanings have no resemblance whatsoever to the recognized meaning in the original language” and that its “various linguistic uses, as they have developed in the United States, have been peculiar to American speech.” In Chinese, concludes Moe, “this is neither a slogan nor a battle cry; it is only a name for an organization.”
The term was picked up by United States Marine Corps Major Evans Carlson from his New Zealand friend, Rewi Alley, one of the founders of the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives. Carlson explained in a 1943 interview: “I was trying to build up the same sort of working spirit I had seen in China where all the soldiers dedicated themselves to one idea and worked together to put that idea over. I told the boys about it again and again. I told them of the motto of the Chinese Cooperatives, Gung Ho. It means Work Together-Work in Harmony....”
Later Carlson used gung ho during his (unconventional) command of the 2nd Marine Raider Battalion. From there, it spread throughout the U.S. Marine Corps (hence the association between the two), where it was used as an expression of spirit and into American society as a whole when the phrase became the title of a 1943 war film, Gung Ho!, about the 2nd Raider Battalion's raid on Makin Island in 1942.
| Copyright © 2015 by Ed Rogers |
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