We've been eating lunch at the large dining hall in the student union building with some frequency. As I mentioned earlier, the dining hall has a number of different stations serving food, one of which is called Sestorang, written in such a way that is makes a complicated multilingual pun.
Erma pointed out that one of the other stations also has a multilingual pun name. Unlike Sestorang, which always features a meal cooked and served on a hot iron skillet, this one always serves a thick soup in a little earthenware crockpot. It's called "HOT뜨거!", which would be pronounced hot-tteugeo. Now, the second part of that, tteugeo, is an abbreviated form of the Korean word for hot, tteugeowo (뜨거워). When a Korean person touches something burning out, they'll pull their hand back and say the equivalent of "Yow, that's hot!" which is at-tteugeo. (The "at" part is meaningless, it's just an exclamation. It rhymes with "hot".) Not only does English "hot" mean the same thing as tteugeo, but if you pronounce "HOT뜨거!" it sounds almost exactly like the Korean for "Yow, that's hot!".
When you are served your food in the earthenware crockpot, it is in fact still boiling.
If any Korean speakers can correct or clarify my explanations, please leave a comment!
Surely, you are definitely right.
ReplyDeleteYou have a good sense in Korean.
Won
It's really Erma who has the good sense in Korean. I'm just getting credit for her insights!
ReplyDeletethe puns are as delicious as the food must be. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteOk, so when did Koreans get so multilingually punny? I'm trying to think of any parallels on my campus -- Panda Express? Sbarro? I'm glad for you that you're able to spend time in such a metalinguistically aware food-providing environment.
ReplyDeleteAmerica is too monolingual for that sort of thing, even on a college campus. What language would you pun in that would be intelligible to more than a tiny minority of students?
ReplyDeleteIn many countries, like Korea, everyone learns English in school, so you can pun with basic English vocabulary (and even the occasional morphological ending, like "'s") and still reach a wide audience.
Yeah, but I was thinking that down here it's so Hispanicized in certain respects that Spanish would be available oh who am I kidding. I'm jealous of all your kimchi action as well. And I have yet to buy a toaster down here, maybe I could just flash-fry my toast like you all?
ReplyDelete