#5. 고구마, 사이다 -- When someone just doesn't get it... and when a hero saves the day!

Have you ever eaten a sweet potato? Although they are gaining grounds in North America in the form of sweet potato fries, they have been a staple in the Korean households for ages. Girls would survive weeks on sweet potatoes alone, because it's supposed to be a great diet food (but it's all carbs, you say. I agree. I don't really see the logic either, but my job is to report, not to argue!) In the winters, you see a lot of people selling sweet potatoes on the streets. They have big metal wood-fire ovens, where they stick in sweet potatoes directly into the fire. After a while, they come out looking and tasting absolutely fantastic. If you get the chance to be in Korea in the winter months, take my advice and try a 군고구마, you won't regret it.

As a quick Korean lesson, 군고구마 is made up of two parts. 군 + 고구마. "고구마" means "sweet potato," while "군" is a shortened form of "구운" (you'll see what I mean if you try saying it very quickly). "구운" means roasted.

One thing to be careful about, though, is that you don't want to eat them too quickly. They are pretty fibrous and dry, and eating them too quickly will make you feel like they have clung everywhere inside your body, from your throat to your chest. This feeling of stuck 고구마 in your digestive tract is pretty similar to how you feel in a frustrating situation.

Imagine that your professor is convinced that you cheated on your exam, when in reality, it was your friend who cheated off you. He calls you into his office and starts lecturing you on how you should never cheat. You try to defend yourself but he's not having it. Your friend then walks into the office, and presents the professor with all the evidence that he didn't cheat, and the professor completely believes him. Now the two of them are looking at you like the worst criminal in the world. Nothing that you say is going through and it's so frustrating.

If you wanted to describe this situation to someone (including your mother or your boss), you could say, "고구마 먹는 느낌이었어" (it felt like eating a sweet potato). Recently, people seem to be picking up on exaggerating the situation even further, and they often say:

고구마 백개 먹은것 같아.

 This translates to "I feel like I have eaten a hundred sweet potatoes" (and they're all stuck without being properly digested, creating that stuck feeling.) If you want to talk about someone being particularly clueless, which is frustrating everyone, you could say something like "쟤 정말 고구마다." 쟤 is an informal language for "that person," and you just make a direct comparison between the person and a sweet potato. Here, it would be awkward to use a hundred sweet potatoes, though.

Sometimes you can also talk about eating boiled eggs as well, because they have a very similar quality of being dense and getting stuck in your throat. You could say "삶은계란 백개 먹은것 같아" instead as well.

If you wanted to get that feeling unstuck, the most readily available method for improving digestion is carbonated drinks. In particular, the 사이다, which is the Korean equivalent of Sprite or 7Up, feels particularly refreshing, maybe to its citrus content, or because of its clear appearance.

Indeed, Koreans use this analogy a lot.  As you are standing in your professor's office feeling frustrated and hopeless, you might think to yourself, "사이다가 필요해," I am in need of some 사이다. Your parents might decide to show up in your defense, and decide to punch the professor's face. Your exclamation might be, "와, 사이다!" Later, you could tell your friends about this adventure, and tell them that "우리 부모님 정말 사이다였어."As an another example, say your rich friend is complaining about how his allowance is only a thousand dollars a week and how difficult his life is. Then another friend tells him to shut up because his allowance is twenty dollars a month, you might call this second friend 사이다, for saying things that you really wanted to say, but didn't for whatever reason.

Although these two usages are definitely in the slang category, it seems that you can use it in most company. A politician described a successful elections as 사이다 to the press, for example. It should of course still be avoided in formal writing.