One example is 찌질하다, which is a word I can’t quite translate into English. My tutor explained it as something that someone would say to a friend who is acting like goof or a geek, but at a party a few days later — literally, just a few days later — Kim Sang Hoon (the Korean translator) and Dr. Q  (ie. Kim Kyu Hyun) were explaining to me the special sense of the word in a little more detail. It’s not precisely geekiness, but rather a kind of overtly childish mode of behaviour that at once comes across as vaguely put-on or conscious but also endearing. At least, that’s what I got from it. Dr. Q said he thought it should become a regular word in English, since Americans do it all the time — and he’d know better than me, he lives in the States. Sang Hoon Kim specifically mentioned the website of a famous Korean genre author and the discussion boards there in relation to being behaving like a 지찔이.

Anyway, there are tons of examples of this, but I’ll just recount one more that is pretty surprising: 오크. At least, I think this is how it is spelled. The word is the Koreanization of “orc,” a word Iimagine was, for most Koreans aside from online gamers and dedicated fans of fantasy literature and media, mostly unknown until 2002, when the first Lord of the Rings film was released here… just as it probably was unknown or forgotten for a large number of Westerners, for that matter. (I imagine most of my non-D&D-playing friends in high school might have encountered the word at some point, but wouldn’t remember what it wqas or, at least, wouldn’t ever have used it in conversation)

Well, my tutor used the word “orc” in passing while describing a nasty incident at the subway station, in the course of illustrating her agreement that our neighborhood is rough and weird and full of unsavory characters.

This guy wants your seat on the subway.

I said, “오크? 오크 뭐예요?” (Orc? What’s an orc?) She smiled and said, “Young people use that word to describe people who are soooooo ugly…” and then described the Korean version of being ugly as sin, based on the specific example: dark, dark brown skin like a farmer’s; tiny, nasty little beady eyes; a broad face; nasty hair; and — this took a little dictionary consultation — pock marks in the skin as if from a long-ago bout of smallpox.

The specifics of that aside — this definition of ugly itself is probably at least somewhat generational, because while fifty or sixty or a hundred years ago, before the age of sun creams, paleness might have been a sign of beauty, nonetheless for most I imagine relatively darker skin from working in the sun would have been the norm — it’s fascinating that a word like Orc has entered the Korean vocabulary in such a way that it can be used directly, as a kind of common metaphor one can assume one’s peers will understand without explanation.

(Another one I’ve sometimes heard is Zerg. Which I think are those little doggie-like creatures in the massively popular (in Korea) computer game Starcraft.)

Not because that’s particularly surprising, mind you: English words (and other foreign words) do this all the time, in Korean. (As they do in plenty of languages.) But the fact that foreign genre-related words can carry more popular resonance in a foreign language and (youth-)culture than in the culture of its origin is surprising and fascinating. Think about it: if you were in a pub in London or Toronto, and were complaining about some ugly jerk on the subway, would you call him an “orc”? And if you did, would your friends understand what you meant immediately, and use the word themselves? I can’t  quite imagine that happening in Canada or the US, somehow… at least not outside of an SF convention.

야! 야! 반대말 하지마라, 이 미친 놈아! 아이씨~~~!

• 신상 정보: personal ID information
• 생물측 정보: biometric information
• 심리학: psychology
• 작업 멘트: pickup line
• 몸이 좋[지않]다: to [not] have a good body
• 핸드폰 번호 따다: to get [someone's] phone number
• 세계 구역기구: The WTO
• 합병하다: to take over [something], for example, the WTO taking over the UN.
• 세상: universe (to be used in the context of discussing baby universes)
• 사고 | 나다: accident | occur (occur being the verb for accident)
• 화학전쟁: biowar[fare?]
• 증거: evidence

These words, of course, are all related to the two stories I’ve been working on for a few months — “The Bodhisattvas” and “Sarging Rasmussen: A Report (by Organic).” The latter being a story about pickup artists (sort of), which explains some of the weirder vocab there.

At about this point, when I was unable to say anything more, both I and my kindhearted tutor — a former student of mine whom everyone seems to agree is the perfect person for the job because of her patience and her imagined ability to kick my ass into shape — agreed that it was a BIG mistake to try talk about the stories I’d just finished or begun editing for submission.

Way too hard. Sort of a kind of trying to run before I can crawl, let alone walk.

Which saddens me: I used to be able to crawl kinda-sorta okay, but even stuff I used to be able to say without a second thought was a struggle last night. Pronunciation, more than vocab. I tripped on my tongue a lot. Maybe I’m just rusty. Maybe it’ll come back faster than I think.

So anyway, kinda-sorta undaunted, we moved on to discussing life with a pet (specifically cats), some politeness issues, general social chatter and gossip, and out ideas on how to proceed with the lessons. I’ll be taking a weekly lesson for the next few weeks, after which my tutor will graduate and I’ll be off for North America.  She plans on being around Seoul, but whether we’ll continue depends on a bunch of things like time, where she ends up living and what she ends up doing, and of course how the lessons go.

As for me, I haven’t decided whether I’ll be bringing a Korean textbook with me this summer. I will be spending lots of time on planes, and I bet even just that time could be usefully devoted to a little study. (I’ll have worked through my Astronomy text before going to Launch Pad, so while I’ll have it, I won’t need to review so much, I think.) My main Korean textbook will be WAY too heavy, but I have a smaller, lighter one I could do, which has better dialogs anyway. Hm. We’ll see.

Or maybe I should be trying to get a little French back, given that I’ll be in Montreal for a month. Or reading this Russian novel I’ve been putting off for ages. Or the rest of Pound’s Cantos? Hm.

Surely most people don’t sit around thinking, “What am I going to read/study while I am on vacation?” Do they?

But it feels good to be studying again. To hell with regretting that I stopped doing so. To hell with feeling embarrassed that my Korean should be better after 7.5 years. To hell with shame and all that. I’m studying now, and that’s the thing I can control, so there.

ME: You have a nose star calipers?^1.
DOLLAR STORE CLERK^2.: Huh? Nose star?
ME: Yeah, you know. Nose star calipers.^3.
DSC: You mean a nose hair trimmer?
ME: Uh… maybe. Nose hair?
DSC: Yeah. Like, this? [Makes snipping motion.]
ME: No, no. I mean like this… [Makes a buzzing noise, and spins finger round in a circle quickly.]
DSC: Oh! Yeah, right over here.
ME: What’s this called?
DSC: A nose hair trimmer.
ME: Ah. Right. Hair. Stars are in the sky, hair is in my nose.
DSC: [With a giddy laugh.] That’s right. Shall I ring it up?
ME: Yes, please do…

Yeah, this is probably a sign that it’s time to bust out the Korean study books again. Though I did have a good chat with the hardcore nice shop guy about snacks and friends abroad.

(He’s a hardcore nice shop guy because, though he looks like someone you ought to be scared of, he’s one of the nicest, coolest people I’ve ever met. He runs a shop down the hill, and his whole family is just a wonderful, happy trio. (I’ve met them in the shop and they’re all terrifically nice people.)

<sup>1. I really said clipper, but I’m assuming I have an accent.
2. It’s actually a 1000 won store but since a number of readers aren’t in Korea, I’m going with the closest thing I can think of to a general anglophone equivalent. I don’t know what they’re called in Oceania or Britain, but I do know most of the Brits here understand me when I say “dollar store.”
3. This is interesting if you speak French. The French word for body hair (or, I think, any not-head-hair on a person, is poil in the singular, while head hair is cheveu in the singular (or, more usually, cheveux in the plural). Korean makes a similar distinction: head hair is 모리 머리 (“mori” “meori”, which is also a word for “head”) while body hair is 털 (“teol”, rhymes with “dull”). Actually, I don’t know whether, in Korean, 털 is a bigger category containing 모리 머리, or otherwise, but anyway, the funny bit is that, if you haven’t used the word in either language for a long time, it’s really easy to mix up poil and 털, but since poil doesn’t sound like a Korean word, it’s also easy to then decide that poil is really 별 (byeol, also rhymes with dull). Unfortunately, this is the Korean word for “star” (as in “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”), and at this point nobody will know what the hell you are saying to them. In other words, I am woefully out of practice. Even the fact I missed lunch today is no excuse.</sup>

(via A Glimpse of the World.)

I think she gets the names of a couple of consonants wrong, by the way, but I’ve only listened once. Anyone notice this?

It came up in conversation the other night, and Lime and her friend couldn’t explain it to me, so I asked Chullsung here at work. He explained that it was something like, “If the two skirts are the same price, I’ll take the fancy royal red one!” Something roughly like that. 다�? is some kind of word for red, which I could perhaps have guessed knowing that �?차 is “red tea”.

Apparently this means something about choosing the better of two options, given that each one comes at about the same “price”: the nicer of two men, the better of two cars, the workable of two work situations. I’m not sure I’ll be able to come up with a situation in which to use it, or whether I’ll remember it if I ever do have such a situation, but it’s still neat to know.

(I’ve recently begun studying Korean again and while I don’t have it in me to sustain regular posting in Korean as I once did on my old Korean blog page, from time to time I would like to practice my writing in Korean, so I’ll post here. I’ve imported my old Korean blog’s posts into a category on this blog, called “In Korean”, which is viewable here.)

(And yes, this means I will occasionally post something only in Korean here. I don’t intend to translate every post, as I have this one.)

대희씨… 당신이 너무 무서워요… 빅 호미니드도 무서워요!

(For those wondering, just click the first link and try this messed-up flash game. The point is to shoot your fingers up someone’s bum. It’s a Korean thing. No, I’m not making that up.)

뿌린 대로 행복하게 거둬세요! 가족도 음식도 줄겨면 생활을 떠잘 평가할수있어서 추석에 깨우자!

Sorry for the bad Korean writing. Happy Chuseok, everyone! I’m spending the day trying to get over my cold. Ungh. I hope all of your Chuseoks are better than mine…

gosol.net에서 고드의 블로그를 comment있어요! 와… 고드가 행복해요. *^^*

누나, 산준씨… 내, 나도 보고싶어요… 주말에 서울에 가요… Plastic People랑 공연 있어요. 다방 밴드의 페이지에 떠 알 수 있어요…

그런데 아마 이따 볼 수 있을거예요!
나중에 봐요…

지금은 전주에 나는 매일 혼자 살지만 때때로 일어게 좋아요. 익산에서 너무 빠빴어서 자주 피곤했다. 요즈음 시간 떠 많아고 생각 할수 있고 책이 읽 수 있고 블로그들의 일 할 수 있어요.

하지만 내 전주 생월 때때로 재미 없어요. 재미 있는 사람을 마나고 싶어요. 그런데, 매 새로운 생월이 일어게 시작해요. 이따, 아마 친구 많알거고 시간 없을거예요.

그래… 지금 가지만 내일 다시 썰거예요…

이것은 미시시피에 쥐수의 노래 입니다. Branford Marsalis 친구랑 연주 했어요… .

Mississippi Fred McDowell의 Goodmornin’ Little Schoolgirl 와 Shake ‘Em On Down Mississippi Delta Blues 입니다…

이 노래가 프랑스 말에 노래 했고 검열 같은 이야기 말해요. George Brassens’
Le Pornographe 와 Les Amoureux des Bancs Publics.

프랑스 음악이 떠: Satie’s 잘 알고있는 Gymnopedie #1. Satie의 작곡들이 너무너무 좋아하고 나는 은악 공부 했을테서 Satie의 작곡 같은 작곡을 작곡 했어요.

구리고, 다른 좋아했는 작곡사: Steve Reich 내 재일 좋은 미국 작곡자 이다. 나는 음악 작곡하기 공부 했을테, Reich의 음악이 내 음악이 영향 했어요. 이 mp3의 찻재 movement 이다… 그리고 내 재일 좋은 Steve Reich 작곡이 이다: Electric Counterpoint, mvt. 1 (Fast) 듣고 기다리고 천천히 모두 변형시키에요… 세게 같에요… ;) 인에 있으면, 너무 예뽀요. Pat Metheny 기타 연주 했어요.

Townes van Zandt의 Pancho and Lefty… 맥시코의 영웅 이야기 이다…

마지막에: Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band’s Der Rebbe Elikmeleh… 율법학자 (래비)의 이야기 이다… Klezmer을 유로파 유태인 음악입니다. 내 생각에는, 조금 봉탁 같은 음악입니다…

오늘은 친구 두 명 봤어요… 찻본 친구는 미국에 가고왔어요… 2002년에 갔고 7월 2003년에 한국에 왔어요. 일음은 선영이다. 선영씨는 영어 잘 배웠어요. 사진 많이 보고 이야기 많이 했어요.

오후에, 네 ex-학생 수연이 나한테 엄어니의 복분자주 주는것 약속 했어요. 재미 있었어요. 그 학생 반장 이다… 하지만 나는 학생 한테 말해: “판찬아! 고마워요!”

그리고 밤에 미석씨 와 같이 마나고 맥주를 마셨어요. 이야기 많이 했고 내일 여행 핼거예요. 같이 낙안읍성 민속마을에 가고 있어요. 와… 재미있다…

그래서… 자야되요… 나중에 봐요!

특는 �?��?� 재미있지만 잠 잘 못해요. 웬야하면 나는 �?�? 하고 �?��?� 떠 해요. 하지만 좋아해요.

아침�?, Intro A 반�?� 너무 좋아해요. 사람�?� 많아고 �?어 �?하기 �?심 진짜 열심히 해�?요. 성수 학�?씨 못 와서 나는 보고싶 지만 매�?� 공부 한 시간�?� 좋�?� 시간�?�다.

밤�?, 학�?들�?� 피곤하지만 요즘 Intro A. 밤�? 공부 한 반�?� 잘해요. 새윤 학�?씨 밤�? 마나�?� 반�? 가고 잘 하고 있어요. 밤�? 공부 한 반�? Gagman 많아요.

오늘�?� 친구를 마나고 순대 국밥�?� 먹고 커피를 마시고 재미 있는 �?�야기 많�?� 했어요. 하지만, 멋지군 여�? 있�?�테 고드 �?�야기 과�?�게 �?해요…

네, 네 언재든지 어디든지 고드 �?�야기 과�?�게 �?하지만 멋지군 여�? 있�?�테 너무 너무 과�?�게 해요…

아�?�고… 수업�?� 전비 해야�?�요…

�?� 어른 반�? 때때로 아�?�같�?� 어른�?� 있어요. 아�?�같�?� 어른 학�?�?� 싫어해요.

단, 어른 같�?� 아�?��?��?� 엄정 좋아해요.

여�? 한명�?� 매 �?� 마다 엄정 심�?해요. 철�?법 시엄 �?�슬테 너무 조심 하고 심�?해요. 개임 놀슬테 �?� 심�?해요.

다른 반�? 남�?는 아저씨 너무 너무 �?닮아요. �?하기 전전히 하고 걷기 아버 같�?.

때때로, 아�?�들�?� 다른 아�?� 한테 심술�?� 있어요. 오늘�?� 근 남�?가 작�?� 여�?를 치기 시작 했어요. John W가 남가를 잡고 사무소�? 갔어요. 나줗�? 나는 남�? 한테 호텅챘어요 (yelled).

하지만 보통 아�?�가 좋아고 재미 있어요.

http://www.gatorlog.com/more.php?id=105_0_1_0_M

I wonder why this isn’t working properly. My trackbacks code seems to be in order, but…

1. 어재 밤�? 수�? 다시 시작 했어요… “butterfly” 해�?� 배우고있지만 뒤를 엄정 앞으고 있다! 그런�?� 재미�?��?나… 내 �?�?�?는 다시 갈거예요.

2. 어재�?� 머리 잔었어요. 지금�?� 12mm 만 있엉요! 시�?하다!

다른 소�?�?� 쓰기 싫어 하지만 모�? 잘 해요.

새로운 사진�?� 보고싶 스며, �?� 페�?�지�? 가고 다른 사진�?� �?�페�?�지�?서 볼수있어요! 펭�?�지들�?� 내 �?어 블�?�? 있어요.

나중�? �?요.

와! 논�?��?� 고마워요!

네, 광주�? 가봤어요. 광주�?서 우리 밴드 (다방 밴드)는 공연 연주 했어요. 곡스 (Gok’s) �?��?�브 �?�업�?� 알아요? 그 �?�럽�?서 연주 했어요.

언재 한국어 왈거예요? 그리고, 언제 미국�? 갔어요? 당신�?� 블�?�?서 다른 논�?��?� 보고 재미있었어요. 어 공부를 어려워요! 화�?�팅! FIGHTING!

요즈�?��?� 어렵는 시간�?�다… 하지만, 떠 어렵지아니�?요… 모�? �?하고 싶지아나요. 하지만 때때로, �?월�?, “세옹지마” �?하기 �?해야�?�요. 때때로 하고싶는 것 있�?�수없어요. 하지만, 보통 피료 있는 것 있어요.

다른 것�?, 모�? 잘 하고있어요. 매�?��? Intro A 가르치고 있어요. 매 반 안 똑같지만 좋아요. 오늘�?� �?탑�?서 학�?들�?� 보고 만았어요. 좋�?� 사람�?�야! 좋�?� �?�야기 했어요…

전주�? 가는 것 재미있�?�거�?요. 하지만 좋�?� �?�산 친구들�?� 보고 싶얼거�?요. 아�?�고. �?�산 월거야�?�요…

아�?�고… 약�? 있어요!!! 빨리 가야�?�!!!

안녕!