From the ancient times, Koreans always have placed a lot of value on humour and satire. If there was a political problem, the literate people would write a fun novel meant to satirize the situation. The common folks would put on a show that makes fun of the higher-up political people. You've probably seen the traditional Korean masks called "탈." The Korean common folks would dance with these masks on in the busy marketplace (which became an artform called "탈춤" or "masked dance") so that people would not know the identity of the brave ones that dared to criticize the powerful people. Koreans believe that by laughing about a problem together, at least there would be moral support for the difficult times that they must endure together.
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| A masked dance like this possibly originated from making fun of a corrupt Buddhist monk (who is supposed to remain celibate) associating with women -- even with this public display, the identity of the dancers were kept secret thanks to the mask (탈). |
The tradition of humour continues to this day, and the internet users of Korea often hopes to come up with a fresh expression that makes people laugh. For example, I have previously written about someone complaining about no meat in his meal.
The opposite word of cliché is probably "ad lib," or "애드립" in Korean, which underlines spontaneity and the novelty. Koreans have shortened this word to "드립" to talk about the new expressions.
As an aside, this shortening makes a lot of sense to the Koreans; remember that most Korean names are three letters, and the first letter is the last name -- for example, "정윤호" is a name of a Korean, whose first name is "윤호" and whose last name is "정." If you wanted to be friendly with this person, you just call them by their first name "윤호." Koreans use this approach to a lot of three-letter words. If you wanted to convey the feeling of vulgarity, you often drop the first letter of a three-letter word and use the latter two letters, if the first letter does not contribute in a major way to the meaning of the word. For example, "아줌마" often gets abbreviated to "줌마" which is a lot more vulgar and familiar in style.
Anyway, "드립" in Korean now applies to an extremely wide variety of internet posts that are spontaneous and funny in nature. It could refer to an entire post that is humorous and unexpected, or it could refer to a single sentence or even just a phrase that brings humour to a situation. For example, here is a post from DC Inside (Korean Reddit) that is considered to be a pretty funny 드립:
The poster spontaneously decided to post about his lunch, as shown in his title "오늘 점심밥" (today's lunch). He then posts a picture of some fries and coke, and writes in the body: "My hamburger got stolen by some elementary school bastard while I went to the counter to get some ketchup."
"초딩" is a standard slang for "elementary school student" (and we also have the words 중딩, 고딩, 대딩, and 직딩, for middle schoolers, high schoolers, university students, and people who work.) "새끼" means a "bastard" and you can pretty much add it to any noun to express your displeasure. For example, if you don't like your teacher, you can say "선생 새끼" or if you just bumped your toe into a table, you can say "테이블 새끼." While it is considered a bad profanity in real life, in most internet communities, it is just another word. Anonymity of the internet does wonders!
"시발" is like "f-ing" and you can pretty much add it to any part of your sentence to convey to the readers that you're upset or angry about something. Any of these would be a valid and natural sentence to a native Korean (I don't understand the grammatical workings, but putting "시발" in any other place would seem unnatural; perhaps you can figure out the rules, in which case, please comment to let me know!):
시발 햄버거는 케찹가지러 카운터 간사이 어떤 초딩새끼가 훔쳐감
햄버거는 시발 케찹가지러 카운터 간사이 어떤 초딩새끼가 훔쳐감
햄버거는 케찹가지러 시발 카운터 간사이 어떤 초딩새끼가 훔쳐감
햄버거는 케찹가지러 카운터 간사이 시발 어떤 초딩새끼가 훔쳐감
햄버거는 케찹가지러 카운터 간사이 어떤 시발 초딩새끼가 훔쳐감
햄버거는 케찹가지러 카운터 간사이 어떤 초딩새끼가 시발 훔쳐감In any case, the original poster of the above was complimented of his "드립" by the other DC Inside users, for being funny, original, and unexpected. The users might have said things like:
ㅋㅋㅋ 드립보소 (Look at the 드립 of this guy!)or
드립 죽인다 (the 드립 is so good that it could kill)There are many words that are born from "드립" which is more or less a root word at this point in the Korean internet, but I will have to deal with those some other time, as this post is already pretty long! However, if you ever wanted to compliment a funny post, try using the word "드립" to refer to the post!
While this word is not offensive in any way, due to the fact that slang is often used within a certain demographic group, you should only use this with your friends, or on the internet.
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