Wordorigins.org

Several of you have written about the following sentence that appeared in last week’s A Way With Words contending that it is grammatically incorrect:

None of these are accurate, although all of them have elements of truth.

The contention is that none derives from no one and therefore should take the singular, as in:

None of these is accurate…

This contention is not correct. None can take either the singular or the plural verb form. The reasons for this are as follows.

Gyp or gip, pronounced with a soft g, got its start as a derogatory term for Gypsy.

The term dates to the mid-19th century. From Gipsey Davy, found in Francis Child’s English and Scottish Ballads, and written sometime before 1840:

There was a gip came o’er the land.

The sense of a thief or swindler is an American one. Gip is glossed as a thief in George Matsell’s Rogue’s Lexicon of 1859. The use of the term to mean a fraud dates to the early 20th century. From Jackson and Hellyer’s 1914 A Vocabulary of Criminal Slang:

Gyp...the act of short-changing; a defrauding by substitution; an action that belies a professed sincerity.

The verb is glossed in the 1880 Century Dictionary.

(Source: Historical Dictionary of American Slang)

This unofficial motto of the US Marine Corps is an abbreviation for the Mandarin Gongye Hezhoushe, or industrial cooperative. The term was used in China, starting in 1938, to refer to small, industrial operations that were being established in rural China to replace the industrial centers that had been captured by the Japanese. The phrase was clipped to the initial characters of the two words, gung ho (or gung he, as it would be transliterated in Pinyin). This clipping became a slogan for the industrial cooperative movement.

Enter Lt. Col. Evans Carlson, US Marine Corps. Carlson was a military attaché in the US embassy to China in the late-30s. In China, Carlson reported on both the operations of the Chinese army in the field as well as the country’s industrial capacity and was favorably impressed by the industrial cooperatives. When the United States entered WWII, Carlson was appointed commander of the 2nd Marine Raider Battalion, a commando unit. Recalling his time in China, Carlson chose gung ho as the motto for his elite battalion and by late 1942 the term was widely adopted throughout the Marine Corps as an expression of spirit and “can do” attitude.

Carlson misunderstood the origin of the Chinese term, believing that it is an imperative gung (or kung, work) + ho (peace, harmony), or work together. This is not the origin, although the clipping of Gongye Hezhoushe to gung ho is clearly a deliberate one that takes advantage of this additional connotation. Many later sources repeated Carlson’s erroneous analysis of the origin.

From the 23 September 1942 issue of Yank magazine:

The Marine commandos have a new battle cry, “Gung Ho!” It’s Chinese for “Work Together.”

And from the 8 November 1942 New York Times Magazine:

Borrowing an idea from China, Carlson frequently has what he calls “kung-hou” meetings...Problems are threshed out and orders explained.

(Source: Historical Dictionary of American Slang)

This word for a firearm most likely comes from a Scandinavian woman’s name. It was and is common practice to name siege engines and cannon after women. Two famous examples are Mons Meg, the 15th century mortar that can be seen at Edinburgh castle, and Big Bertha of WWI fame. In this case, a weapon or weapons seem to have been named after a woman or women named Gunnhildr, and the name generalized to mean all such weapons.

Both gunnr and hildr mean war in Old Norse, making it an apt name for a weapon, even though there is no historical personage of significance named Gunhildr. There is at least one known example of a particular siege engine named Gunnhildr. A 1330 munitions list from Windsor Castle reads:

Una magna balista de cornu quae vocatur Domina Gunilda.
(A large ballista from Cornwall called Lady Gunilda.)

There is also this from a somewhat earlier poem The Song Against the Retinues of the Great People, written in the opening years of the 14th century:

The gedelynges were gedered Of gonnylde gnoste; Palefreiours ant pages, Ant boyes with boste, Alle weren y-haht Of an horse thoste.
(The lackeys were gathered out of Gunnild’s spark; the grooms and pages, and boys with their boasting, all were hatched of a horse’s dung.)

Gonnylde here may be a transitional form between Gunnhildr and the Middle English gonne, and gonnylde gnoste appears to be a reference to some type of explosive (gnást being Old English for spark).

Variations on gonne, in the modern sense of a firearm, appear in English records written in Latin and French starting in 1339. The first recorded use of of gonne in an English language text is by Chaucer in The Hous of Fame (c.1384):

Went this foule trumpes soun As swifte as pelet out of gonne Whan fire is in the poudre ronne.
(Went this foul trumpet sound As swift as a pellet out of a gun when fire is running in the powder.)

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition)

This European name for part of the west coast of Africa has given rise to a number of terms and senses, but its origin is unknown. The name first appears in Portugeuse as Guiné, but beyond that we have no clue where it comes from.

It seems strange that a derogatory term for an Italian or Hispanic would come from the name for a region in Africa, but Guinea did not always carry this meaning. Dating back to the mid-18th century, the word was used to refer to blacks in the Americas. This citation from 1748 is recorded in the journal American Speech:

Run-away, a likely well-made Guiney Negro Man, named Toney.