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.

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. 

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.¹

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. The following notice appeared in the South Carolina Gazette on 12 May 1748:

Run-away, a likely well-made Guiney Negro Man, named Toney.²

One might assume that this term is a 20th century one. After all, warfare in that century was often characterized by guerrilla combat. Guerrilla warfare is the choice of the oppressed seeking to throw out foreign oppressors, and the 20th century has seen lots of colonial wars. The term, however, is much older.

It dates to the Napoleonic campaign in Spain (1808-1811). The earliest English usage cite is by the Duke of Wellington in 1809 in his Dispatches 1799-1818:

I have recommended to the Junta to set...the Guerrillas to work towards Madrid.

In Spanish the word is a diminutive of guerra or war; so guerrilla is literally little war.

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition)