Very enthusiastic, dedicated to the task at hand; also, overzealous. The term, also spelled gung ho, comes from a Chinese phrase meaning “work together,” adopted as the name for small producer cooperatives organized in the late 1930s to help the Chinese economy during the Chinese-Japanese war. The term was then adopted by Marine Lieutenant Evans F. Carlson for his battalion of volunteers, Carlson’s Raiders, formed just after Pearl Harbor. In 1943 a war movie dramatizing one of the Raiders’ early victories was entitled Gung Ho! and the term caught on. In the military, however, it also came to be applied to an offensively ardent follower of rules and regulations. Richard Martin Stern had an early civilian usage, “In those days he was very gung ho for National Socialism” (The Kesssler Legacy, 1968).