놓친 고기가 더 크다
be-escaped-PASTPART fish-SUBJ more be-big
The fish that got away is bigger.
This is equivalent to “The grass is always greener on the other side.” I believe people also say something exactly like this in English, when someone wistfully says, “The one that got away…”
The word 고기 here seems to mean “fish,” but normally the word 고기 is more generic than that – it means any animal flesh-as-food: 소고기 “beef” 닭고기 “chicken meat” 물고기 “fish” (literally “water meat”).
But whereas for most living animals the term 고기 isn’t applied (in the same way that in English a term like “beef” or “pork” is rarely applied to living animals), with fish it’s generally the only possible word – the generic word for “fish,” even a pet fish in a fishbowl, is 물고기 “water meat.” Hence it seems to arise that 고기 can be shorthand for “fish.”
Another, alternate way of reading this is that 고기 means “game” – as in “that which is hunted.” Read as such, an alternate translation of the above is the more generic: “The game that got away is bigger.”
I spent my weekend, such as it was, being antisocial. Yesterday, I turned off my phone and only came online for about 2 hours. I have been doing more writing on actual paper – being low-tech, trying to keep away distractions and keep things simple.
I’m not sure I’m succeeding. I turn off my phone because otherwise I find myself compulsively looking at it, like my students, and then I pull the ethernet wire out of my computer to keep myself from surfing the web, although I keep my computer on because it’s also my music player and general self-organizer.
Maybe I need to just throw it all away and live like a monk?
