I saw the above headline on the television news last night. It’s pretty hilarious, but it was meaningful to me because it was one of those exciting, rather rare moments when I saw Korean text and immediately parsed and understood what it was about – it was a moment of “native” understanding, which makes it sound like I’m really good at Korean, and I’m not. But it was nice to have just an instant when I wasn’t puzzling out vocabulary items with a dictionary or trying to sort out weird grammatical constructs in my brain. I suppose the visual cues on the screen might have helped a little – I’ll leave it as an exercise for the readers to determine what those visual cues might have been.
So… what does it mean? 미국, 고무로 닭인형 달리기 대회 = miguk, gomu-ro dalkinhyeong dalligi daehoe = USA: rubber chicken throwing contest.
Now that’s news worth knowing!