A few days ago, I overheard the phrase 깐죽 at work, in the context of the English word “smart ass.” Ever since, I’ve been trying to puzzle out if there’s something equivalent, there, but the more I try to figure it out, the more I don’t think they’re really the same thing. You can imagine, though, why having a Korean phrase for “smart ass” might be useful to a teacher of elementary age Koreans with limited English ability.
There is nothing in the online Korean-English dictionaries for 깐죽 or its verbal derivatives (as reported to me by coworkers: 깐죽거리다, 깐죽대다). The Korean-Korean dictionaries didn’t seem very useful (or maybe I didn’t understand them well enough). Naver.com, for example, says, “쓸데없는 소리를 밉살스럽고 짓궂게 들러붙어 계속 지껄이다.” This is, in itself, hard to take apart, and it took some time pooking around google translate (plus the dictionary and some grammatical knowledge, because google translate is, by itself, useless for Korean-to-English) to even get the gist of it, which is something like, “To chatter on uselessly and harassingly in a vulgar manner.”
While I can see why someone would draw the link between a phrase meaning that, and the English “smart ass,” they’re still not really the same, as it neglects the “smart” part of it – the fact that a smart-ass doesn’t just chatter uselessly, but that the smart-ass has an aspect of “too smart for his/her own good.”
One translation I found encouraging was in the lyric of a song called 청춘고백 by Outsider (image, right), translated here. The translation offered for 깐죽거리던 is “snarky” – which is closer to “smart-ass,” definitely.
Conclusions? None, really.
“깐죽” seems to be related to the idea of talking too much, and/or out of turn, and/or vulgarly, but I don’t see much to suggest it implies speaking in “smart-ass” way specifically. So it only means smart-ass in the more broad meaning of the latter term.
What I’m listening to right now – the song I mentioned.
Outsider (아웃사이더 [a-ut-sa-i-deo]), “청춘고백.”
This is Korean rap/r&b. Awesome.
