I found this aphorism in my book of Korean aphorisms.
굽은 나무는 길마가지가 된다 gup.eun na.mu.neun gil.ma.ga.ji.ga doen.da be-crooked-PART tree-TOPIC packsaddle-branch-SUBJ become-PRES A crooked tree [can still] become a tree-swing.
This is to say, something that seems useless can still prove useful, when seen in the right light. The word 길마 [gilma] gave me some difficulty – I can’t actually find any online result to match the idea that it means “swing” – but I found that it can mean “packsaddle” (as on a donkey, ox, or horse), and that seems close enough semantically that I think that’s how this works. A “branch-packsaddle” seems a plausible idiom to express the idea of an a treeswing.
