Gung-ho means wildly eager, charging in without much thought for the risk. The volunteer who signs up before hearing what the job involves.
The word came into English from Chinese by way of the US Marines in the 1940s, and it kept the military flavour: a gung-ho commander, a gung-ho approach. It is only half a compliment. Enthusiasm is the good part, and the missing caution is the part people are warning you about — describing a colleague as a bit gung-ho is not praise. It sits in front of nouns and after verbs equally happily, as in he was gung-ho about the whole thing.
cmn
工合
English
gung ho
English, today
gung-ho
Built from
gung ho comes from a catachresis of cmn 工合, an acronym for 工業合作社 (“[Chinese] Industrial Cooperative Society”), as 工 + 合. The interpretation "work together" was created by U.S. Marine Evans Carlson, who was posted in China during the 1930s. It became the motto and nickname of the enthusiastic battalion Carlson commanded, leading to other marines adopting the term to mean "overly enthusiastic". It was popularized in the United States by the war film Gung Ho! (1943), which profiled the battalion's leadership of the Raid on Makin Island during World War II.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Man Called Ove
First appears in chapter 31 of A Man Called Ove.
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