#82. 금수저 -- Thanks to your parents

As I get older, I'm noticing that life is less fair than I expected it to be. Do your best, follow your heart, and everything will work out. I try my best, and while I'm satisfied with my life, there are people who seemingly don't have to try very hard to get everything that they want.

The most infuriating of those people are perhaps the people who were born to rich parents. They literally lucked out once by being born to rich parents, and everything else seems to have fallen into place for them.

In Korea, this phenomenon is even more visible, as they have the culture of chaebol (재벌), where the ownership of large corporations are passed on within family (Samsung is the largest chaebol family in Korea). Many of the children born in these chaebol family are, as you might imagine, spoiled and entitled. But for the most part, they seem to live their lives in comfort and wealth with seemingly no consequences of their entitled behaviour. It can be truly frustrating to see that someone is getting ahead of you when you are doing your very best.

Koreans might say:

"부모 잘만나서 호강하네" (He met good parents, and he's living the good life)

"부모" is "부 (father)" + "모 (mother)" in Chinese, and "호강" means to "live a luxurious (호화스럽다) and comfortable (강, as in 강녕하다 or 만수무강하다) life."

I find this to be a surprisingly a flat expression by the Korean standards! Surely the Koreans can do better? The netizens of Korea soon found a better expression from the English language: "to born with a silver spoon in one's mouth" was more descriptive, and it resonated with the Koreans. Silver is "은" in Korean (such as "은메달" or "silver medal") and spoon is "수저" (you can say "숟가락," but "수저" is a bit more old-fashioned and more fitting since we're trying to translate an old expression.)

So Koreans started saying:

"입에 은수저를 물고 태어났네." (Literally, born with a silver spoon in one's mouth.)

Now, if you were a Korean internet user who was aspiring to be complimented for your 드립, how would you take this expression further?

The Koreans just took the natural steps forward -- while your rich friend in school might have been born with an 은수저 in his mouth, the children of chaebol were even more jealousy-inducing, and they must have been born with something better than an 은수저. The obvious candidate is a 금수저 (golden spoon). Then even among the chaebols, children born in a particularly successful family, such as Samsung, were born with a 다이아수저 (dia-spoon, short for diamond spoon).

As this is not offensive (to most people, anyway), the media even picked up on it, and now it is one of the most commonly used slang expressions (even in formal writing!) Look below (click to enlarge) to see approximately what kind of spoon you were born with!

"자산" means the total worth of your household; "가구" means your household, and "연 수입" is the annual income. If you want to call yourself a "금수저," your household must have at least $2M USD as assets, and annual income of $200K USD.

 For the brevity of expression, Koreans at some point opted for calling someone a "금수저," "은수저" etc, instead of going with the full expression of having been born with a spoon in one's mouth. So, you could enviously call your rich friend a "금수저" in Korean slang.

Then the regular people on the internet also wanted a word to contrast themselves against the rich people, or the "금수저s." They opted for "흙수저," or a spoon made out of dirt, or even "똥수저," a spoon made out of, well, feces.

As for the nuance of these words, I always find that all of these words are often spoken with a fair amount of bitterness and frustration. There are a number of problems with the Korean society at present, where the younger people are having trouble finding jobs, housing prices (in Seoul, where most people want to live) have skyrocketed and it is often impossible to buy a house even with 10 years' worth of your salary, and so on.

There is exactly one kind of spoon that is spoken purely with humour.

This guy was born with a "핵수저," a nuclear spoon. I don't think that anyone will try to argue with this one!