Friday 1 August 2025

The Remainder

article

OORAH. In a 2004 article for the U.S.A.’s Marine Corps (USMC) website, Staff Sergeant – and drill instructor – Hugo Monroy was asked about the meaning and the origin of the Marines’ battle-cry – oorah:

“As far as its origin, I really don't know. I always assumed it was simply a Marine tradition that was passed down from Marine to Marine. [...] As far as [the meaning,] I had been told, ‘Oorah simply means ‘let’s kill…’’”

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A ‘war-cry’ or ‘battle-cry’, like oorah, has been a feature of conflict throughout recorded history; intended to strike terror, raise morale, and – hopefully? – communicate victory. For example, in ancient Greek myths – such as Homer’s epic poem, the Iliad, written circa C8th BC – one learns of the hero Diomedes’ epithetical war-cry in the moment (or ‘aristeia’) he wounds Ares, himself the god of war:

Now Diomedes, lord of the war cry, lunged at Ares,
thrust with his bronze spear, and Pallas Athene rammed it
home, into his guts where the war-god’s belt cinched tight
and there the stabbing thrust went plunging through his flesh.
Ares bellowed loud as nine or ten thousand soldiers
shout when they clash and battle cries break in fury.
And a shudder swept through Achaeans and Trojans both,
terror-struck at the bellowing war-god Ares.¹

In reality, the sound of Diomedes’ war-cry would likely have been a kind of ‘ululation’, which is to say it would have had a ‘trilling’ or ‘lele’ quality. The goddess ‘Alala’ – similar to Ares – was the personification of this war-cry, whose name was given from the Greek ἀλαλή (alalḗ) or ἀλαλάζω (alalázō): ‘to raise the war-cry’. This is, in some way, attested in a mid-C18th retelling of the tactics of the Ancient Macedonian army, presented in the third volume of the Universal History:

…after the fight was begun, as often as occasion offered, the king addressed himself to the army, and endeavoured by all means to excite them to the performance of great things. If the soldiers were pleased with the king’s speech, then they signified it by the clashing of their arms, but if it did not affect them, then they remained silent. When they charged, they cried out, Alala, Alala, a word which has no proper signification; but may be properly enough rendered into English by a word used to the same purpose, viz, Huzza.²

This English equivalent – Huzza – is attested from the mid-C16th and is likely based on an even older, perhaps Middle English, sailor’s hoisting or rowing chant – heave-ho! – with corollaries in many European languages: hissa (Swedish), izar (Spanish, Ho, hisse! (French), and, have howe (Middle English). As evidence of these nautical origins – on the first of July, 1665 – diarist John Evelyn made note of his arrival on the Prince, a ship docked at the mouth of the river Medway:

1 July downe to the fleete, with my Lord Sandwich1 now Admiral, [...]: went on board the Prince a vessel of 90 brasse ordnance, (most whole canon) & happly the best ship in the world both for building & sailing: she had 700 men: They made a greate huzza or shout at our approch 3 times…

It is then a short journey to hurra – from which we might eventually extract oorah – here documented in correspondence between booksellers John Dunton and Richard Wilkins, in accounts of their colonial travels to New England during the late-C17th:

…as soon as ever they took boat again our Capt. ordered all his Guns to fire; at which they all of them (which were about twenty) fil'd the very Heavens with Hurras and Shouts, and Shaking of Hats and Gloves…

As with all origin stories, this is a speculative retelling, and others – including etymologists at the OED – have proposed that the C17th modification to hurra is instead (also?) an onomatopoeic representation of a “rapid whirring motion”; be that a charge into battle or the discharging of cannonfire. Likewise, many ‘folk-etymologies’ of the Marines’ oorah centre around an onomatopoeic interpretation. One story, written in the ‘Marine Corps Times’ focuses on fellow ‘leatherneck’ Sergeant Major John Massaro (who enlisted into the corps in the 1940s), and argues that:

…Massaro carried the popular phrase into his drill field tours after it was used during his days with 1st Marine Division Reconnaissance Company in the mid-1950s. Massaro, then a company gunnery sergeant, and the men who boarded the submarine Perch for recon and raid training in the decade after World War II got in the habit of saying "oorah" while imitating the sub's klaxon horn that sounds off as "arrugah."

When asked, Massaro denied his involvement in these origin stories, but added:

“I was blessed, [...] I try to sit back and look. The hand of Providence guided me where I went.”

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In her 1975 essay Fascinating Fascism, Susan Sontag observed that fascist aesthetics display:

...a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain; they endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude. The relations of domination and enslavement take the form of a characteristic pageantry: the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the multiplication or replication of things; and the grouping of people/things around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader-figure or force.

Representations of war are challenging, both to produce and to bear witness to, regardless of whether they glamourise – or gloss over – its violence or not. What emerges from oorah’s etymological sketch is perhaps most clearly revealed in the idea of an onomatopoeic transformation: bodies learning to identify with machines, with oars, ships and weapons. This suggests something beyond simple linguistic borrowing; the migration or ‘memeification’ of terms like ‘oorah’ across civilian contexts – corporate boardrooms, fitness studios, social media, fortnite lobbies – seems to reproduce Sontag’s pattern. Military vocabulary trains people to understand daily activities through the lens of both individual excellence and collective submission, where extraordinary effort becomes a marker of personal distinction and institutional loyalty.

Deleuze called this kind of language a ‘watchword’ – words that ‘are not informational but performative,’ which create the social relations they appear to describe. For Deleuze, writing in Postscript on the Societies of Control (1990), this language connects to a broader transformation:

The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information [– we might also say power –], or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become “dividuals,” and masses, samples, data, markets, or “banks.”.

The military unit provides one template for this – sailors responding to klaxons, Marines chanting in unison, gamers coordinating through headsets.

The spread of military language at home as a result of conflict overseas – and of battle-cries in particular, think “Slava Ukraini!” – suggests a deepening reactionary turn, perhaps even towards a new kind of ‘epistemological warfare’. Where liberalism historically sought to subject military power to civilian oversight (albeit somewhat hopelessly), the everyday use of military language seems to naturalize hierarchy, efficiency and deference as political goods. ‘Oorah’ becomes a particularly clear example: a vocal response that signifies readiness without requiring understanding.

The ancient Greek war-cry ‘alala’ ’marked singular encounters with divine power, moments when ordinary social relations were suspended and transformed; but for all its glorification of war the Iliad also recognises its futility. As Glaukos tells Diomedes in a moment of reflection on the battlefield at Troy:

High-hearted son of Tydeus, why ask about my birth?
Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men.
Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth,
now the living timber bursts with the new buds
and spring comes round again. And so with men:
as one generation comes to life, another dies away. ³

This article was written for a monthly column in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout

Oorah

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Footnotes