Andrew, Hollye and I met my friend Seungbae in Seoul for dinner. I ended up ordering 온면 [onmyeon = warm noodles], but I didn’t eat very much.
I enjoy Seungbae’s company, though – he’s amazingly smart in his autodidact way. He says “I’m just a farmer” but he knows 5 languages and can easily keep up with my discourses on history or culture.
I took a picture of them outside the restaurant.
On the way back home in the subway, Andrew was looking at a box for a USB flash drive that Seungbae had given as a gift. It said, among many other things, “1.1호환” and I was trying to figure out what that meant. I put 호환 into the dictionary on my phone, and learned that 호환 [hohwan] means “disaster caused by tigers.” This is profoundly excellent information – but I suspect not really an accurate translation.
What, exactly, constitutes 1.1 disasters caused by tigers? How does one evaluate the concept of one tenth (.1) of a disaster?
This morning, I looked it up. The online dictionary at daum.net said the same thing: “호환 [虎患] a disaster caused by a tiger; the ravages of tigers.” What was funny, though, was that the automatically generated list of example usages following gave a hint of how the term is actually used: it’s used to mean “compatibility.” So why isn’t this meaning in the dictionary? Once again I raise that perennial question: why are Korean-English dictionaries so bad? Even my Korean-Spanish dictionary only has: “desastre causado por tigres”- clearly just a translation of the original Korean-English mistake (I suspect most dictionaries rely on some ur-dictionary created long, long ago, and just pirate and repackage the content from generation to generation, from book to translation to website to smartphone app).
This is one instance where the googletranslate gets it right, and says compatibility. It gets it right for the same reason the auto-generated list at daum is right – because it’s a statistical correlation of texts rather than a copy of some dictionary badly written (by humans).
Here’s another, tangential question, though: what does it say about Korean culture that they have a special word for a “disaster caused by tigers”? Or at least… that they used to?
Food for thought. And food for tigers…
Speaking of disasters…
What I’m listening to right now.
Someone on the internet decided to do Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” using some web-based emulator of Mario Paint. I guess this might be titled “Get Retro.” It takes existing at a certain strange confluence of cultural nostalgia and nerdiness to even “get” why this video is so entertaining, of course.
I took a picture of the moment before sunrise, this morning, out my window looking east.
