#7. 오글거리다 -- Overly sentimental

If you've spent even the smallest amount of time watching Korean dramas (highly recommended), you know that these dramas are thickly laden with mushy and lovey-dovey dialogues that you would never dare to utter in public unless you wanted to face snickers from everyone around you.

Believe it or not, Koreans feel the same way about these scenes.

 

I make this exact same expression when I see these cheesy scenes.

There's a slangy expression for this reaction in Korean, which I believe doesn't exist in English. Notice what Merida is doing with her hands. This finger-curling reaction must be universal, because Koreans say that over-sentimental scenes make their fingers and toes curl, or:

손발이 오그라든다.

"손발" just means "hand and foot," and "오그라든다" means "shrink while curling inwards." In my opinion, this is a pretty perfect description of our reaction. Here's a four-cut Korean webtoon that depicts the perfect situation where you can use this expression.

Woman: Huh, what are you looking for?
Man: Ah... I'm looking for a key but I can't find it...

Woman: Do you need some help? What key are you looking for?

Man: The key that will open your heart.

손발이 오그라들다. Source

There are a few related expressions as well. Instead of using the verb "오그라들다," you can also use an adjective "오글," more commonly using it twice for emphasis "오글오글," and say "오글오글하네." For strong emphasis, you could say "온몸이 오그라든다" (my entire body is curling up), but Koreans often invent their own expressions too.

Another related expression you might see in this direction is the phrase "손발 퇴갤." The letter "퇴" usually means exit, or going out. When you leave work for the day, you say that you are going to "퇴근." When you exit stage, you say "퇴장." The letter "갤" is short for the DC Inside Galleries (갤 is from 갤러리, Koreanization of the word "galleries"). This means that your hands and feet have left the galleries, where you have presumably just seen something incredibly cheesy. Your hands and feet shriveled up to the point where they are just not there anymore. Reading this phrase always feels to me as if it has an English equivalent, where the commenter is announcing, "Ladies and gentlemen, my hands and feet have just left the house."

On a website, I have seen a commenter write, "손이 오그라들어서 팔꿈치로 타자친다." He has written, "since my hands have shriveled up, I am typing this with my elbows." This is a typical Korean internet humour, which, in my opinion, is characterized by very fresh perspectives and humorous imagery that is completely unexpected.

Finally, you can talk about just how much of this stuff you can take. The amount of natural resistance that you have to the sentimentality is sometimes called "항마력" in Korean internet-slang. "항마력" actually means the "ability to resist the evil." All three characters have Chinese origins. "항" means to resist -- think of the word "대항" which means to "resist against"; "마" refers to the things magical -- the words such as "마녀 (witch)," "마법 (sorcery)," or "마귀 (devil)" all have the same letter; "력" means power or ability -- "활력 (vitality, or power of life)," "인력 (manpower)," and so on.

항마력 is often a character attribute in online role-playing games. This word naturally made its way into the Korean internet scene, because a lot of people spending time on the internet play these kinds of games, and because it just feels so appropriate! After all, what could be more evil than a couple being lovey-dovey to each other in public? This word is almost never used in real life, unless you're talking to your buddies, whereas "손발이 오글거리다" is much more widely accepted in the Korean society. As long as you don't directly insult someone with it, you can use this latter in almost any situation!