#104. A trilingual Korean joke (Hanja 3)

I saw the following photo (or 짤, if you are fluent in Korean internet language) while browsing a Korean website. The poster of this image claims that this is a useful image to download onto your phone, and send it to whoever you are texting at an appropriate moment. Can you guess when you are supposed to send this photo? (answer below the image)

The answer is that you send this photo when someone is making excuses. To understand why, you need to be trilingual, amazingly.

The word "핑계" matches up with the background photo, which depicts a pink rooster. The letter "핑" comes from the English word "pink (핑크 in Korean)," and just taking the first letter from it. And the letter "계" comes from the Hanja meaning "chicken." As far as I am aware, the letter "계" does not refer to either the male rooster or the female hen.

The full name of this Hanja is 닭 계. For an explanation of how Hanja works, see my first post on it!

This Hanja appears often enough in the Korean language that the Koreans would relate the letter "계" to a chicken; I am not sure if I would have recognized this Hanja if someone just showed it to me, however. Some Korean words that use this Hanja letter 닭 계 include:

- 계란 (literally, an egg of a chicken -- so it would be wrong to use this word for an ostrich egg, for example!)

- 삼계탕 (Samgyetang, a Korean chicken stew, where you boil a whole chicken with various roots believed to be very good for your health)

- 군계일학 (one crane among a group of chickens; this word is used to denote someone who is way above everyone else in a group)

So, a "핑계" could mean a pink chicken, because of this clever wordplay using Hanja. Of course, this is just slang, and a fairly minor one at that, almost like an English pun. The prevalent meaning of "핑계" that you can find in a dictionary is "excuses."

The next animal is fairly self-explanatory: a "돼지" is a pig. In this case, however, the Koreans noticed that "돼지" sounds almost like "대지," which is difficult to translate alone in English. The point of this substitution is that the above phrase becomes "핑계 대지 마," which means "don't make excuses." The word "대지," coming from the verb "대다 (to give, tell, or apply things such as excuses)," roughly corresponds to "make" in the above sentence.

And the final animal, which is a horse, comes with a single letter "마." This is another Hanja!

This Hanja, which you would learn sometime in elementary school in Korea, has the full name of 말 마. So it means a horse (말), but it would be read as the letter "마" in Korean. Some Korean words that include this Hanja are:

- 마굿간: a stable (for horses)

- 출마: to leave on a horse; however, nowadays, it means to become a candidate for an election, as all government officials going to work would have been riding their horses back in the olden days.

- 애마: beloved horse (along with the Hanja 사랑 애, meaning love); however, nowadays, this is a slang referring to your car. This slang has been used across all generations!

Anyway, putting all of these three photos together, we get:

"핑계 돼지 마" (pink chicken, pig, horse),

  which sounds nearly identical to

"핑계 대지 마" (don't make any excuses).

So, by the virtue of the fact that most Koreans will understand this short photo that incorporates all three languages (Korean, English, and Chinese/Hanja), the above photo becomes a witty internet .jpg file to use among the Koreans! Having spent a lot of my life in notoriously monolingual countries, I am occasionally blown away by just how non-monolingual the Koreans can be!