Caveat: Snow-water

In the wake of last week's talent show, we had some "market day / game day" events with the elementary students this week. Yesterday, I was with our relatively small and not terribly talented Tuesday/Thursday cohort, and we were playing a "picture game" that is popular with the kids – it's a bit like charades, but instead of acting, you draw a picture on the whiteboard, they have to guess the word. The vocabulary involved can be as simple or complex as necessary for the given group. This group can handle "dog" and "television" but not "parachute" or "tears."

It was this last word that led to a kind of entertaining result. A student drew a face with tears on the board, with a little arrow to a tear drop. It was a respectable representation. I knew the kids knew what it should be, because they were saying it in Korean. But they lacked the word in English. The word "tears" was simply not part of their vocabulary.

One kid got innovative, though. The Korean for tears is "눈물" [nun.mul, literally "eye-water"]. But the first element, "눈" [nun "eye"], is a homonym in Korean: "눈" [nun] also means "snow." So when I rejected "eye water" as unacceptable as a possible word meaning "tears," he tried "snow water," grinning triumphantly at his cleverness. Unfortunately, puns don't translate.

For some reason, this seemed quite funny and poetic at the same time.

I'm sure this pun has been quite productive over the years in Korean symbolism and poetry.

Crying our snow water… 

[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: Random Poem #4

(Poem #305 on new numbering scheme)

The free spirits of mountains,
of ephemeral cities
lacking well-conceived futures,
of unnamed rivers and lakes
shimmering on horizons,
of towers spiraling up,
asymptotic to time's lines,
these spirits will not speak, but
loiter on the pale edges
of maps, of dreams, of stories.
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