A Mandarin Chinese speaker is curious about the origin of gung ho, referring to great enthusiasm. It derives from an anglicized Chinese expression, kung-ho, meaning “work together,” which was adapted and popularized by Marine officer Evans Fordyce Carlson as gung ho. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “How Kung-Ho Became English Gung Ho in the Marines”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, this is Jerry calling from Washington, D.C. How are you, Grant and Martha?
Great. Well, what’s on your mind today?
I’ve always had this question I wanted to ask, and it’s the term gung-ho. And just a little bit of background story is I speak Mandarin at home and I speak English. Gung-ho sounds like it’s related to a Chinese word. It doesn’t sound like anything I know personally. I’m just curious if my hypothesis of where this word comes from is even true. So that’s my question.
So Jerry, what do you think of the word gung-ho or the two words gung-ho is meaning in English?
Right. So I’ve heard multiple different uses for this word. Some people use it as an exclamation like, oh, gung ho, job well done. That’s one way. Or some people have used it as, oh, he’s gung hoing after that project. It’s just a positive connotation to my knowledge. And that’s how I’ve always used it. But I don’t really know what it really means. You know what I mean?
So just so everyone at home knows what we’re talking about, it’s G-U-N-G space H-O, gung ho, right?
Right. Okay, great. And it has to do with great enthusiasm.
Right. It does indeed. And so your question is, is this truly of Chinese origin?
Right. Well, I’m only guessing because it sounds like Cantonese, but I don’t speak Cantonese. I speak Mandarin at home. So it doesn’t sound anything related to that, but I’m just guessing. No, it could be wrong. It’s usually attributed to Chinese in general. It’s really interesting. If you look this up in slang dictionaries and regular dictionaries and specialty etymology dictionaries, none of the ones that I have actually tell me which dialect of Chinese it supposedly came from. But they all will tell you that it came from Chinese. And I’m putting that in quote marks because, as we all know, Chinese isn’t really one language. It’s a lot of languages with a very similar writing system or identical writing systems, right?
Right. The short version of this is during the early 1900s, there were these kind of work cooperatives in China, you know, kind of precursors to the communist era working organizations. And in English, they were known as Chinese industrial cooperatives. They’re kind of a group decision making and self-management. And in Chinese, and this is the Roman version, the Latin letter version of this, the romanization of it, Zhongguo, Gongye, Hexuoxie, something like that. And shortened to G-O-N-G-H-E, an E usually with an acute accent on it, so it kind of looks like Gonghe. And you can find this word, gungho, written as kongho with a K instead of a G, in English-language Chinese newspapers in the early 1900s, in 1916, for example. And so it’s the Chinese writing in English for an English-speaking audience about their government and their organization. And sometimes it’s English-language Chinese newspapers writing in response to whatever the Chinese government was doing. So it’s kind of like these propaganda newspapers from two different sides of the political spectrum, all writing about these cooperatives.
Fast forward a little bit. So by the late 1930s, early 1940s, when World War II breaks out, there’s a huge American presence in that part of the world. And the Chinese and Americans were, for the most part, allied against the Japanese and had some agreements together. They did some exercises together. They kind of operated together. And there was a fellow in the Marines by the name of Evans Fordyce Carlson, who later became, I believe, a brigadier, who borrowed Kung Ho as Gung Ho and began to use it among his Marines as a way of emphasizing working together. And he became the guy who was known as the popularizer of it in the Marines. And so that’s how, for the most part, that this idea of Kung Ho and the original Chinese version entered the language as Gung Ho. It was through the U.S. Marines.
Wow, that’s a rich history behind that. I didn’t know that.
Yeah, and by the 1950s, in the Marines, Gung Ho underwent another transformation. And even now, Gung Ho is often used to describe people who are too enthusiastic. Like the new recruit who is all about the rules or all about the Marines. They have the energy and enthusiasm of the convert. So gung-ho now in the Marines isn’t necessarily a compliment.
I’ve always used it as kind of a positive thing. I didn’t know that it can be used as a negative connotation, if you will.
Yeah, in the Marines you can have that negative conversation. But I would think in everyday American English, gung-ho, you might go, he was really gung-ho and he said he was completely committed to our strategic plan or whatever it was.
Yeah, I think of it as very positive.
Well, Jerry, thank you so much for your call.
Well, thank you for your time. Thank you, guys. Love your show.
Thank you. Take care. Bye-bye, Jerry.
Well, we’re gung-ho to hear from you, so call us, 877-929-9673, or send us an email. That address is words@waywordradio.org.
