Do "aliens" (외계인) know when to go to the bathroom?

ANSWER: Apparently not.

In the story below, a grandmother has "dementia" (치매), which apparently causes her to forget when to go to the bathroom, a symptom Koreans describe as "대소변을 가리지 못 하다." The word 대변 means "feces," and the word 소변 means "urine," so 대소변 can translate as "feces and urine" or "urine and feces." The word 가리다 can translate as "to choose," "to select," or "to discriminate," so 대소변을 가리지 못 하다 literally translates as "unable to discriminate urine and feces," which implies that a person does not know when to go to the bathroom. That means that a person with such a problem will go to the bathroom wherever he or she just happens to be. 

The girl in the story below, who is about to graduate middle school, talks about how her grandmother gets up in the middle of the night and turns their house into a 쑥대밭, which literally means "mugwort (쑥) and bamboo (대) field (밭)" but implies an overgrown, uncultivated plot of land or, in other words, a wasteland. Except that in this case, the girl seems to be implying that the wasteland in their house is made up of feces and urine.

The girl also talks about how her grandmother these days follows them around the house all day "whining" (칭얼대다) for them to play with her, something the girl does not remember her grandmother doing when the girl was younger. So, the girl starts to think of her grandmother as being "a strange alien being" (낯선 외계인) and wonders what happened to the grandmother she used to know, the one who used to love and take care of her and read her bedtime stories when she was a little girl. 

I like this story, and I like the way it is told, though I think the use of the word 외계인 to describe the grandmother is a little immature for a girl who is about to graduate middle school. Use of the word would make more sense if the girl were only about five or six years old. A girl in middle school should be able to understand what dementia is and what it does to people. Nevertheless, this story still brought a tear to my eye. 

 

 

What smells worse than a "rice fart" (쌀방구/쌍방귀)?

ANSWER: A "barley fart" (보리방구/보리방귀).

Koreans apparently used to believe that the more barley you ate the more you farted. They also apparently believed that your farts smelled worse if you ate rice with barley mixed in it. So Korean school kids in the past probably wouldn't have wanted to share a 2-person school desk with a poor kid who ate rice with a lot of barley in it, especially if that kid rarely washed his hair and had body odor that smelled like a "cesspool" (시궁창). In Korea, poor people used to mix barley in with their rice because barley was cheaper than rice.

Now imagine that your teacher makes you and the students in your class change "desk partners" (짝꿍) once every month. Last month the girls got to choose the boy they wanted to sit next to in class, and this month the boys are supposed to choose the girl they want to sit next to. The "barley-farter" (보리방쥐쟁이) in this class is 조수택, who works after class delivering the "evening newspaper" ( 석간신문). Which girl will he choose to sit next to, and how will that girl react?

In the past, when 조수택, who is better known as "보리방구", was assigned a new desk partner, the new partner would always ask the teacher for a different partner, but the teacher always refused until 조수택, sensing that the student didn't want to be his desk partner, asked the teacher himself if he could sit alone in the back because it would help him study better since it would give him more room to hang his bag on his chair and more room to spread out his elbows on his desk.

So, which girl in class will 조수택 choose to sit next to, and how will that girl react? The only hint that I will give you is that there are a lot of sad stories in Korea.

By the way, the adjective 멋쩍다 means "to feel embarrassed, awkward, or uncomfortable," but 멋 by itself can mean "taste," "charm," or "elegance," and "-쩍다" means "to feel" or "to have a feeling," so why does 멋쩍다 mean "to feel embarrassed or awkward" instead of "to feel charming or elegant"? I am not sure, but maybe the word 쩍다 here is a dialectical pronunciation for 적다, which can mean "few" or "little." So, maybe 멋쩍다 literally means 멋이 적다, which could translate as "lacking charm or elegance," and that would imply "awkwardness."