Now one of the great tourist attractions in China, the wall was originally built in ancient times during the Ch'in dynasty. It was rebuilt in it's present form during the Middle Ages by the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). Made of earth, stone and brick, it is about 25ft high, between 15 and 30 feet wide and about 1,500 miles long, with watchtowers at regular intervals. The wall meanders across northern China. It was built to keep out Barbarians from the north, but successive invasions proved the wall to be of little practical use. It is sometimes seen as an expression of Chinese xenophobia.
Any protective barrier, not just against a physical enemy but also against foreign ideas, is referred to symbolically as a Great Wall.
gung-ho:
From the Chinese, meaning "work together", this term was adopted by Lieutenant Colonel Evans F. Carlson as the slogan for his marine battalion. Known as Carlson's Raiders, they won a stunning victory over the Japanese in a surprise attack against Makin Island during World War II. This assault became the subject of the 1944 movie Gung-Ho! Generally used now to mean enthusiastic, eager, all-out.
Use: After the coach's pep talk, the players were all gung-ho for the game against their arch-rivals.
gulag:
Russian acronym for Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps, a chain of forced labor camps in the Soviet Union. The Russian Nobel prize winner in literature, Aleksander I. Solzhenitsyn, drew upon his own experiences as a prisoner to reveal the horrors of the camps in such books as 'One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich, The Cancer Ward, The First Circle and the Gulag Archipelago.
Now the word describes any prison or detention camp, especially for political prisoners.
For an online exhibition of gulags, go HERE
guns before butter:
Slogan coined in 1936 by Nazi political and military leader, Hermann Goering: "Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat". He was urging Germans to sacrifice domestic comforts to an all-out preparation for war.
The phrase is now used to mean the sacrifice of amenities to hard realities.
Great White Father:
A nickname for a United States president, it appeared in popular Western novels about 1916?. Now used to describe any important, influential, beneficent figure in industry, government and other fields.
