gung-ho

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’.

ketchup

Think ketchup originated in America? Well, despite the fact that 97% of American households have a bottle of the red stuff in their kitchens, this condiment actually started life on much more exotic shores. The word ketchup comes from a Hokkien Chinese word, ‘kê-tsiap’, which was the name of a sauce made from fermented fish. (While any food with the word ‘fermented’ in it just doesn’t sound appetising, I think this was actually quite similar to soy sauce.)

So how did ketchup migrate? Well, it’s likely that British travellers brought ‘kê-tsiap’ home, before attempting to recreate it in their kitchens and anglicising it as ‘catchup’ (also ‘catsup’). The first written mention of ‘catchup’ is in ‘A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew’, a dictionary of English slang first published in 1698. It has over 4,000 entries and, frankly, sounds awesome.

At some point ‘catchup’ mutated into ‘ketchup’. And the first published recipe for ketchup appeared in 1727, in ‘The Compleat Housewife’, an incredibly popular cookbook by Eliza Smith which went through a massive 18 editions. Ingredients in Smith’s recipe included anchovies, shallots, vinegar, ginger and nutmeg, and involved shaking the bottle once or twice a day for a week before using it. A second recipe for ‘ketchup in paste’ appeared in 1732, written by one Richard Bradley (who was the first professor of botany at Cambridge University, and also published the first recipe with pineapple in it – hopefully it wasn’t a pizza). This still wasn’t the ketchup we know today though – the main ingredient was red beans, and there definitely weren’t any tomatoes in there. Other versions followed, often containing mushrooms (apparently Jane Austen was a big fan of mushroom ketchup), unripe walnuts (YUM) and oysters. At this point ‘ketchup’ was really just another word for ‘sauce’.

Despite having been brought to England in the 1500s from South America, tomatoes weren’t popular as people actually thought they were poisonous (possibly due to the lead from lead pewter plates leaching into them). So it wasn’t until around 1812 that the first tomato ketchup recipe appeared. James Mease, a scientist from Philadelphia, gets the credit for this, although he loses points for calling tomatoes ‘love apples’ (due to their reputation for being an aphrodisiac – which seems somewhat at odds with the whole poison thing, but never mind), which doesn’t seem very scientific, and sounds gross. A little start-up by the name of Heinz then introduced their recipe in 1876, and the red sauce we know today was born. Today Heinz is the best-selling brand of ketchup in the United States, with more than 650 million bottles sold every year.

I still don’t like it though.