Caveat: Monks About

I recently came to the realization there must be a Buddhist temple in my building. Sometimes I hear chanting-like noises, and at first I thought it was a neighbor’s television – but it really didn’t sound like a normal television program. And then I saw a sign near the back entrance to my building, and that sort of confirmed it – the swastika is the standard Korean symbol for “Buddhist establishment” used on signages and maps. Here is a picture of the back entrance to my building.
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Caveat: Humilific Fun

“Humilific” is a real word – it describes a class of Korean words (mostly verb infixes and pronouns) that are used to show deference on the part of a speaker with respect to a listener.  They are somewhat the inversion of an honorific, which are linguistically more common, and which exalt the listener’s position with respect to the speaker.  A good example of a beginner’s level humilific is the use of 저(jeo) instead of 나(na) to mean “I” (first person singular).  When I call a student’s house, and I get a parent who I can’t expect to speak English, I have a phrase of badly pronounced Korean where I say “I am the English teacher” and I use this humilific form for the “I” in this sentence:  “저는…” (jeo-neun …).
Here is a picture of a building I saw in Suwon, on top of the hill I climbed there last month when I went there, just for kicks and to provide something interesting to look at.
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And for those who feel that the price of gas in the U.S. is out of control, consider this:
pictureThat’s 1913 Korean won per liter, which comes out to about $7.25 a gallon at recent exchange rates.  The fact is, American gasoline is highly subsidized, if only indirectly – not least by that astronomical Iraq war cost, but also by military aid to e.g. Saudi Arabia.
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