Over the last several days I’ve come down with a truly horrendous cold/flu (감기). My voice sounds low and gravelly and halting. It’s a good thing work has been relatively undemanding, as I still have a reduced teaching schedule due to the middle-schoolers’ mid-term test-prep time, but our upcoming first annual Karma talent show is demanding that I do a lot talking in the classes I do have – we’re practicing songs and skits with my elementary students. I end each day voiceless and hoarse.
떡 본 김에 제사 지낸다
rice-cake seen while-AT ancestral-rites stay
As long as you’ve seen the rice-cakes, stay for the ancestral rites.
I found this one in my grammar bible in slightly different form, while researching the paraphrastic “-ㄴ 김에” – which at least I recognized as a paraphrastic. It is glossed as “while one is at something,” and I took the liberty of reading it in this case as “as long as one has V.” The equivalent proverb in English might be “Strike while the iron is hot.” As long as you’re doing one simple thing, do the other more complicated thing as well.
