gung ho
- idiom
- /ɡʌŋ hoʊ/
- Informal
- So a lot of risk taking and being gung ho, but in a good way.
- so gung ho
- really gung ho
- too gung ho
So I'm not as gung ho when I have to contract.
- So I'm not as gung ho when I have to contract.
- So a lot of risk taking and being gung ho, but in a good way.
- And it's, they're all gung ho about the funding, the front end of everything.
- Because it doesn't seem like his gung ho, war fearing, war mongering ways have been left behind him.
- The Africans were gung ho on continuing this as long as they could get away with.
- They were just gung ho to get going on destroying this place with magical art.
- But things are, you know, they're getting better and I can't expect them, you know, to be fully, you know, gung ho about this.
- Also, would you rather play under Mourinho's more conservative way or the Elsa's more open attack minded kind of gung ho way?
- I ain't going to say tricked, but then you get coerced into being gung ho about vote, vote, vote nigga man, That's what we say.
- And we, we hear about these and I'm not particularly some, you know, right wing, you know, Republican, like gung ho.
- And his name is Brett Payne is very gung ho guy, very also in your face cop when he needs to be very well authoritarian.
Examples
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It's all about adapting to decline and somehow being plucky and gung-ho in spite of it all.
Blog text (33) -
You know how gung ho he is about improving the department's image.
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So the question is, what happens when people get too gung ho about data science?
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I think I may have been a bit gung-ho.
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And when I look back on it now, it was extremely gung-ho.
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No longer was I feeling as gung-ho as I was moments earlier.
Blog text (17) -
Mayor Spencer was and Mayor Battle is all gung-ho for construction.
Blog text (29) -
Thatcher was very gung ho about this whole thing right from the first minute.
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Maybe he's a little too gung-ho, but I'll give him a break.
Fiction book (1995) -
He was very gung ho about starting the new project, always ready to take on more challenges.
Synonyms
Feeling too excited or eager in a way that bothers other people
Being very lively or excited in a way that feels too much
Giving praise in a way that sounds too excited and not honest
How Enthusiastic
Surface Forms
Morphology
gung + ho
The meaning 'very enthusiastic and eager' is not transparently built from the constituents: 'ho' has no clear lexical meaning in English and 'gung' is rare/opaque, so knowing the parts would not let a learner infer the idiomatic sense. The phrase is a conventionalized loanword/idiom (originating from Chinese) with a fixed meaning in English, so B1 learners who only know the constituent items would not reliably derive it.
Etymology
Gung ho comes from a Chinese phrase meaning 'work together'. During World War II an American officer used it as a battle cry to get his soldiers excited, so today it means 'very eager'.