Back to October 2001.
At some point, I was discussing on I think usenet about swear-words in different languages. I promised to ask my Korean friends. Shortly later I reported back....
Finally got a chance to ask today. My friend says there's plenty about sex, though she just told me one, 'jotna' which she says is the same as 'fucking' (it's certainly used in the same sorts of places though I'm not certain if it means exactly the same) -- oh, she also mentioned 'ssipal', which is pronounced the same as the word for 'eighteen', but either I forgot to ask, she neglected to answer, or I've forgotten sometime in the course of a truly hellish day what it actually means if anything, and I can't even remember where she said it was used; it's definitely milder, I think somewhere along the lines of "damn", but I'm not sure. (She also taught me 'shiro' and 'joa', 'assa!' and 'arasso' but they only mean respectively 'I don't like it', 'I like it', 'great!' and 'I see', and though they're in colloquial forms they're not in any sense expletives.)
She did say that there weren't so many about religion. She said there were some but she couldn't think of any off-hand. I will continue to pursue this angle, even though it requires periodically assuring her that I won't utter any of these words in front of the people from her church.
"Bokyu!" is also a common angry retort amongst the children I teach (to each other, not to the teachers! Except one preschool kid said it to us from a bus window, and got severely told off the next day.) It's the common mispronunciation of "Fuck you," and I presume has filtered in via movies (subtitled, rarely dubbed). Today my class of eleven year olds wanted to know what it meant and were very annoyed when I wouldn't tell them.
(Eleven years is their average age. One is ten, a couple are twelve. One of the 12-yr-olds was angry today at one of the 11-yr-olds because the latter called her by her given name instead of by "older sister". Only someone your own age can be your friend, you see, anyone else is your senior or junior. I caused great consternation when I asked one of them on Wednesday how old a friend she'd mentioned was. She seemed almost offended.)
Another random note on Usenet:
Korea, which has a very high population, has some truly weird jobs. Like the girls in uniform whose job it is to stand at the entrance to the supermarket carpark and bow at incoming and outgoing cars, or the girls in bright plastic skirts and tops who dance underneath an arch of balloons outside a shop on opening day. It's mostly bars but also the new huge electronics store and I think the new icecream parlour did it as well. It's just a thing that new shops do practically universally and you ignore the girls like you ignore the swarm of shop assistants who offer to help you if you so much as glance at a piece of their merchandise.
Yet another:
Worked from 9am to 9pm including 9 hours of teaching, which is going to become a weekly occurence for the next month or two. Managed to be horribly crabby at some kids who didn't deserve it today (though they have on other days) while fighting to keep from falling asleep. My throat is now slightly hoarse from the way I don't-quite-recall shouting at them. (And from shouting at my preschool kids, but those ones did deserve it and at least I was awake then enough to judge the fact.)
Thankfully only one kid turned up for my 7.30 class, and she was the nice one who can talk decently, so we chatted for the first half of the lesson. I discovered that she not only likes fantasy, she has ambitions to write it, but she says she can't. Seems she thinks she can't write funny fantasy, and she says the stuff that's popular here is all funny. I told her that a) there must be some serious stuff too, and b) if you don't try you won't succeed, and was going to explain how c) it's surely possible to write so seriously about something that everyone'll see the humour in it; but this was a more complicated argument and the bell rang before I got to it. We joined another class to watch part of "Stuart Little" for the second half of the lesson.
Go on to Christmas.
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