I guess this will be a less thematically-organized blog post than usual. Just call it a journal-like summary of the day.
For her last day here, my mother wanted to return to 영천사 [yeongcheon temple] which is the temple on the hill closest to my apartment. I had [broken link! FIXME] taken her and Jacob there not long after they arrived. This time, Jacob didn't come – he went to do his own thing. Ann and I took a taxi to the very top, this time, though it was more expensive and a bit complicated to explain to the taxi driver, since the temple isn't well known and isn't on the typical online Korean map (not sure why that is).
We sat and watched a funeral taking place at the temple, and talked quite a bit, and walked back down the mountain slowly and came back home.
I took her to work to meet the rest of my coworkers that she hadn't met yet – but they were all fairly unsocial (shy? too busy? uninterested?). Then I sent mom home and taught my three classes.
My first class was one of the so-called "CC" classes (the origin of this term remains mysterious to me), where we listen to pop songs in English and try to write down their lyrics and sing along. So I found myself singing. I guess the song is an old theme song from the Pokemon movie – but the kids didn't recognize it, as the movie is probably too old to be familiar to them.
My last class was my middle school TOEFL class, and we did a practice debate about nuclear power in Korea. Now I'm having technical problems getting the video file off my camera.
Tomorrow I go to the airport to drop off my mom and Jacob, and then I go to the hospital to get my follow-up, post-radiation CT scan.
What I'm listening to right now.
M2M, "Don't Say You Love Me."
The lyrics:
[Verse 1:]
Got introduced to you my friend
You were cute and all that, baby you set the trend
Yes you did oh
The next thing I know were down at the cinema
We're sitting there, you said you loved me
What's that about?
[Verse 2:]
You're moving too fast, I don't understand you
I'm not ready yet, baby I can't pretend
No I can't
The best I can do is tell you to talk to me
It's possible, eventual
Love will find a way
Love will find a way…
[Chorus:]
Don't say you love me
You don't even know me
If you really want me
Then give me some time
Don't go there baby
Not before I'm ready
Don't say your heart's in a hurry
It's not like we're gonna get married
Give me, give me some time
[Verse 3:]
Here's how I play, here's where you stand
Here's what to prove to get any further than where it's been
I'll make it clear, not gonna tell you twice
Take it slow, you keep pushing me
You're pushing me away
Pushing me away…
[Chorus]
[Bridge:]
oooo, na, na, na, na, na, na, na
na, na, na, na, na, na
oooo, na, na, na, na, na, na, na
na, na, na, na, na, na, na
Don't say you love me
You don't even know me baby…
Baby don't say love me, baby
Give me some time…
[Chorus (repeat until fade out)]
[daily log: walking, 3.5 km]
Is this the end of family visits for now? I’m so glad so many could come. Still praying for your mouth to heal. Our bodies are awesomely designed.
My guess: “CC” may be one of the many jumps from American-English to Korean whose meaning became distorted on its cross-Pacific voyage, and that…CC may mean “Closed Captioning”.
Maybe a Korean went to the USA, years ago and long before the Internet, and observed this “CC” option on American TV. He saw that “CC” would make the words people say appear on the screen as text. He went back to Korea, and began to spread this word “CC” as meaning very broadly “dictation”/”transcription”. Maybe that guy was in English education. The word “CC” spread because Korea had no TV captioning yet and thus no word for it, hence its association with “dictation” (as your class is about), a concept they probably did have a word for. Eventually Korea itself began to acquire “closed captioning” and a Korean word took over (자막?) and by now the word “CC” has long since vanished. It survives into the 2010s in nooks and crannies like Karma (/its predecessor[s]), where its supposed-English-connotation kept it afloat when the class was first being named, and now into the 2010s the name stays just through inertia.
This is a lot of conjecture, of course, but it makes sense to me. [This: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_captioning#Full-scale_closed_captioning tells me that U.S. TV captioning began in 1980].
(BTW, this cross-cultural-slight-distortion-in-meaning may be a fair basic definition of “Konglish” itself..a lot like CVS meaning “general convenience store”…and what about your theory on the origin of Korean “cider”?)