#39. 발암 -- It's killing me!

Here's an expression that I'm not a huge fan of, but it is used widely as of a couple of years ago.

There's some degree of belief among the Koreans (although not nearly as widespread as fan death, I think!) that stress causes cancer. FYI, it seems that there's no real evidence that stress causes cancer at the moment.

Anyway, if you frequent the Korean internet, you will undoubtedly see a lot of stress-inducing users. Some of them are so blinded by their own convictions that they refuse to have a conversation, preferring to more or less resort to circular logic and using the technique of 도배 to get through their points. Some of them are so foul-mouthed (even by Korean standards!) that you actually cannot stand reading their profanity. You of course see them everywhere on the internet worldwide, but because of the unique Korean internet culture, I always find that the problematic users are more problematic in Korea. At least, while I am very rarely bothered by the anglophone or francophone internet users (the only two other languages that I am confident with) I am often shaking my head at the Korean internet users.

This, of course, happens a lot less frequently in real life, but these people exist nonetheless.

Since some of these experiences are stress-inducing (and downright traumatizing if you're not used to the Korean internet culture,) the Koreans call these people "carcinogenic," or "발암" in Korean. The letter "발" means to "induce," as in "유발 (to cause)" or "시발점 (starting point)." The letter "암," of course, just means "cancer."

The word "발암" is completely standard, featured in Korean dictionaries, and if you wanted to use it in its proper way, you say it in sentences such as:

석면은 발암물질이다. (Asbestos is a carcinogenic material.)

However, in its neologism, it means that you are so angry and frustrated, and that you have that feeling of stuck 고구마 in your chest (probably eventually leading to cancer.) In this usage, Koreans might say:

 보람이는 남의 말은 들으려고 하지도 않아. 걘 정말 발암이야. (Boram never listens to others. She is carcinogenic.)

You could also use it as a prefix, and talk about a "발암 영상" (cancer-inducing video clip, meaning a video clip that makes the viewer angry and frustrated) or "발암 경기" (cancer-inducing game, when your team played so terribly that you nearly died from the frustration).

When I first heard it a couple of years ago, I was so violently against this expression because it felt like such a heartless and uncouth thing to say when so many people are affected by cancer each year. However, this word seems to be used in a fairly lighthearted way, often just substituting the word "frustrating." I am still very much against it and have never used it myself, and perhaps for the same reason, this word seems to be in a rapid decline -- I saw it everywhere a year ago, but not nearly as much nowadays. It's not completely out of fashion yet, however.

For this reason, I would reserve using this word only for conversations with very close friends, or on the internet (where more things are forgivable, for what it's worth.) But in any case, it's a good usage to know, since otherwise the expression probably doesn't make sense as a non-Korean.