I have a student who says this one phrase all the time. It seemed to indicate a kind of fatalistic and pained attitude with respect to assignments, tasks, homework, etc., as today when she took a look at a page of “paraphrasing” exercises we were working on and exclaimed “망했다” [mang-haet-da]. Finally, I broke down and asked, what does this mean. She said without pause, “ruin.” This was funny, but I suspected it wasn’t a very good translation.
Some research shows that the underlying verb, 망하다, does include a meaning of “ruin,” as well as “perish, die out, destroy, go bankrupt, crash” as well as “to be ugly, to be unbecoming.” But the googletranslate also gave me a hint when I found one fixed expression where the verb, with a slightly different ending, was translated as “damn.” In an online dictionary, I had found the example phrase “망할지 오랫동안 살아남을지 누가 알겠는가?” which is given with the translation “Who knows if it may sink or swim in the long run?” But the same Korean phrase in googletranslate gives “Long damn that would survive, who knows?” – which is undeniably utter nonsense, like most of googletranslate’s output – but it nevertheless provided that “damn” as a clue.
As a result of this research, combined with the evident usage by my student, I’ve decided that the pragmatics of the phrase are essentially, “Damn!” or perhaps “Crash and burn!” as it was used in certain programming circles I worked in, when some task was essentially impossible.
In any event, I like the phrase. Perhaps I’ll try to be brave and use it at the appropriate moment, sometime.
I finally used another phrase today that I’ve been hearing for ages and understood the pragmatics of, but which intimidated me because of how disconnected its literal meaning was from its pragmatics: 들어가겠습니다. The pragmatics seem to be, “take care,” in the way we use that phrase to say “good bye” in a familiar way. But the literal meaning of the underlying phrasal verb, 들어가다 is “to enter.” How does saying, “[I] will enter” end up meaning “good bye”?
Enter what? I’d like to know. One coworker explained, somewhat brokenly, that there’s an elided, never-stated, “my home” home in the phrase: “I will enter my home now.” I suspect it’s a little bit like Mexicans saying “andale” which literally means “walk on it,” but has the pragmatics of “that’s right,” or even “take care.”
But I used it and everyone just said other similar good-bye noises in an utterly unremarkable way. It works. Language is weird.
