Jingo

   , JINGOISM

We don't want to fight,

But by jingo! if we do

We've got the ships, we've got the men

And got the money, too.

   A jingo is a rabid patriot who favors an aggressive foreign policy for his country. Jingoism is to Britain what chauvinism is to France. Originally by jingo was employed merely as a mild oath. There have been many conjectures of the genesis of the phrase, including "by Jesus" and "by Jainko," the supreme god of the Basques. In the seventeenth century, jingo was a common expression of conjurers, but they never revealed the meaning. The Oxford English Dictionary states that jingo was originally "a piece of conjurer's gibberish." It was the only English term derived from the Basques tongue.

   With the advent of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, jingo came to be applied to superpatriots itching for war at the slightest provocation. There was much excitement in England just before the British Mediterranean squadron was sent to Gallipoli to frustrate Russia's designs on Constantinople. In 1878 the "Great MacDermott" sang a popular music hall ditty, written by G. W. Hunt, which took the music halls by storm. The Russophobes became known as jingoes, and a noisy war-mongering policy has been labeled jingoism.