noun, slang ·Common ·High school level
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"A few days later he had a 'damned good party' at NORMASH, drinking brandy, and he then 'beat up a Gook [Korean] village.' This resulted in an 'awful hangover all day', […] Later, he walked back to his unit, alone at three o'clock in the morning, having 'swiped a Gook torch.'"
""Roost No More" was a yellow gook that Joe's people would spread around, for a fee, on the ledges of houses and commercial buildings plagued by pigeons."
"the poor old gook was spitting blood"
"Some say 'Mar Teazer do live in pattens and gook; must go to bed in 'em I'm thinking!"
"Of course, I've got so many confirmed kills I lost count. Nobody believes me because the gooks drag off their dead."
""Haiti is a country with a history, […]" "but how about the Marines, and the gendarmerie; aren't they on the job?" […] "You know darn well a civilian can't get away with handling a gook like a Marine can; […]""
""But shit, man, don't we do a fucking good job of it. Jesus, we slew long gooks this last trip," quipped Mark."
"A few days later he had a 'damned good party' at NORMASH, drinking brandy, and he then 'beat up a Gook [Korean] village.' This resulted in an 'awful hangover all day', […] Later, he walked back to his unit, alone at three o'clock in the morning, having 'swiped a Gook torch.'"
A person of (South) East Asian descent (originally revolutionaries of the Katipunan then generally to any native of the Philippines, after the enemy and collaborators hid amongst them), but now especially:; A Korean person (especially the North Koreans during the Korean War).
Common synonyms include: albumen, american indian, amerind, australian aborigine, baloney, batter.
A few days later he had a 'damned good party' at NORMASH, drinking brandy, and he then 'beat up a Gook [Korean] village.' This resulted in an 'awful hangover all day', […] Later, he walked back to his unit, alone at three o'clock in the morning, having 'swiped a Gook torch.'
Pronounced /ɡuːk/.
First attested in the 1890s, US military slang in reference to Filipinos (in particular, it is defined in an 1893 citation in Slang and Its Analogues as referring to prostitutes who followed army camps; it is defined similarly in a 1914 work). The word was used for Nicaraguans during the US military occupation there in the 1910s, and for Haitians during the US invasion there, when Herbert Seligman noted in 1920 that "The Haitians … are nicknamed 'Gooks'". Other early uses in the 1920 and 30s still refer to people from the Philippines (a 1921 work refers to the Philippines as "Gook Land"), and the term also resembles goo-goo (“a Filipino person”), for which a variety of etymologies have been proposed; see that entry for more. (A later folk etymology suggests that during the Korean War, North Korean soldiers would shout Korean 美國 (Miguk, “America”) at Americans, who interpreted it as "me gook", as if identifying themselves as "gooks"; this ignores the many earlier examples of the word outside Korea.) Gook was used of Pacific Islanders by World War II, and Koreans and Vietnamese people by the time of the 1950s and 60s US military interventions there, which cemented the shift to meaning "Asian".
Possible blend of goop + gunk, or related to gobbledygook.