As I was correcting some student journals last Friday, I found the following page-o-doodles inside the back cover. Given this is a fourth grader, I was duly impressed.
Many of these little vignettes are quite fascinating. There’s quite a lot going on.
I was particularly intrigued by the “병신 bottle+God” in the upper left. 병신 [byeong-sin] is a word that means things like “crippled”, “deformed”, “retard”, “fool”, “idiot”. It’s standard schoolyard insult vocabulary, in other words.
But here in her picture, the individual morphemes have been (mis-)translated into “bottle god”. Is this a common inter-lingual pun in the 4th grade set? Did she come up with it herself? What about the fact we’ve been reading Aladdin in class – is this “bottle god” the Genie? Was she thinking of that? Or is she recalling some passage from The Little Prince (see other doodles)? Or was she thinking about her drunk father? (I shouldn’t say that, but I, uh, happen to know… there was an incident, this one time at the hagwon…)
Then again, there seems to be a video game character of some kind called “bottle god” which may be an actual intentional or accidental inter-lingual pun on the part of the game developers (recalling that South Korea has a huge native games industry and is not above inserting bizarre bad English and also intentional puns into their products).
