Some of my students have taken to wrting 옼돜 on things – the whiteboards in class, their notebooks, their pencil cases, their desks (ahem).
This is not Korean. I asked them what it is. They said it means “Okie Dokie” : the hangeul, sounded out, is in fact something like ok-dok. I tried to figure out if they had adopted this phrase from me alone, or if it has some wider cultural diffusion recently in Korea. I know that I say it quite a bit – it’s one of those verbal mannerisms or tics that I use with kids, and I see it as having come to me from my father and to him from my grandfather John, who I remember saying it.
What’s interesting to me is how it it’s not quite phonetic, in the way that they’re writing it, and hence it’s an innovative use of hangeul. To represent okie dokie phonetically would require 4 syllables, not 2: something like 오키도키 [o-ki-do-ki]. Further, they’re deploying it visually, not in spoken form – more like a graffiti tag than a catch-phrase, e.g.:
옼돜!☺
[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]