#58. 미만잡 -- You don't reach my standards

There are many ways to entertain yourself in the Korean internet scene. You could, for example, engage in the hobby of 어그로 끌기 (usually by saying something controversial and enraging many people at once, which is not unlike trolling), you could produce a lot of funny 드립s to bask in the glory of your witticisms, or you could play a little game of 낚시 to spread false information and see who falls for it.

Here's one other way to be annoying on the Korean internet without bringing on a full-scale keyboard war. Suppose that you found someone who was bragging about her achievements. She is talking about how she is a student of 연세대학교 (Yonsei University, often regarded as one of the top schools in Korea), how her relatives gave her a new iPhone for her birthday, how people say that she looks like a well-known k-pop girl group member, and she is going on and on.

While you don't feel that you have the energy to get into a fight with her, you want to annoy her a tiny bit. So as she is writing things about herself, you start adding these little comments to her writing. When she writes that she goes to Yonsei University, you comment:

대학은 서울대 미만잡.

The word "미만잡" comes from two Korean words. The first part, "미만" means "less than." For example, the inequality "2 < 5" is translated to "5는 2 미만이다." It also gets used in sentences such as "You will not be offered admission if your score is less than 70," which is translated to Korean as "70점 미만의 점수로는 입학허가가 나지 않습니다." The second word, "잡," has been written about before. It comes from the word "잡종" which means "mutt." Korea used to have a caste system, and people belonging to the lowest caste were often called "잡것" (mutt thing). So the word "잡" carries a very negative connotation and is insulting when you hear it.

This means that the word "미만잡" signifies something along the lines of "anything less than a given standard is a mutt thing (i.e. useless and irrelevant)." Therefore, by the above quote, you are saying that "no matter what university you go to, unless you go to Seoul University, you are nothing more than a mutt thing."

In this case, it's more humorous than anything, since everyone knows that Yonsei University is actually a great school. But by saying the above phrase, you are just being annoying, and slightly insulting the girl for not having made it into Seoul University (Seoul University is almost certainly more elite than Yonsei University in the Korean system.)

You can continue to annoy her, by saying the following things too. When she brags about her new iPhone gift, you can say:

선물은 현금 미만잡. (Any gift less than cash is irrelevant)

When she talks about her beautiful face, you can tell her:

얼굴은 김태희 미만잡. (Any face less than Kim Tae Hee's face is irrelevant)

This is 김태희, often considered the most beautiful actress by many Koreans.

 While you are obviously setting a very high standard and no one is expected to meet all of them, if you keep saying things along these lines, you are sure to be annoying! By the way, there is a verb for behaving in this kind of subtle annoying way: you can say that you are "깐족거리다." (For example, the girl that you are annoying might tell you, "깐족거리니까 진짜 짜증나네." -- you are annoying because you are "깐족거리다.")

Of course, there is another context in which you can use the word "미만잡." Suppose that you are a fan of a k-pop group (for convenience, let's just say that we're all fans of IOI.) In order to advocate how great your group is, you could tell everyone:

IOI 미만잡 (Anything less than IOI is irrelevant).

 The difference between the two meanings are always clear depending on the context.

IOI was a girl group produced via a survival program. They were very popular although they disbanded after a year.

 This is of course a slang popular among the younger generation of Korea. As you traverse up in age group, the word "잡" is more and more offensive (because the older generation probably remembers the days of the caste system more clearly). With your friends, you should be able to use this word without offending people (although it depends on what you do with the word!) while I would stay away from using this word with the people of the older generation.