Just learned more Korean today! (Was very inspired by the "Do you want to eat some ramyeon?" idiom from last night). Apparently, a green frog is a rebellious child who does the opposite of what his mother tells him (or her? not sure but I feel like it's more likely to be a son) to do. So the mom, anticipating the son to do the opposite of what she says, tells him to bury her near the river, thinking he'll do the opposite, but instead he actually for once in his pathetic life does what he's told and honors his mom's last wish, and the mom's body washes away when the river swells up. First of all, sad story, and a great lesson about not burying people in low sea levels, but I feel for the parents! Some kids are just born to never follow directions, and you never know when these "green frogs" will finally mature and turn into full adults and actually get it. It could be really early (teens), 20's, or never! It's different for everyone. Second of all, these are the kinds of stories parents deliberately tell their kids to affect behavior, and now having gone through that process I see how effective it is. It's like the story of Santa Clause to get kids to behave well, or Gods, or the story of the Boogeyman, or that there are sharks in the ocean that will eat them if they go too far out, or that if you swallow gum it'll take 7 years to pass through your system, etc., etc. As a lawyer it sounds like the kids should band together as a class action and sue their parents for fraud and deliberating misrepresentation, but as parents it's brilliant: kids will always be curious if parents tell them "NOT to do something," they'll inevitably want to do it. (Should have told the kids recently who threw rocks on a highway overpass and killed a driver with a rock- horrible story, every car driver and passenger's worst nightmare) You need something so scary but believable to scare the kids straight into not doing that activity, ever.
I often feel like the green frog in my relationship with MJ. She says don't get blood on the towels, I inevitably get blood on the towels. She says don't put fruit garbage in the wastebasket because they attract fruit flies (and instead put them in the freezer, an ingenious idea I never thought of), I inevitably leave some fruit in the wastebasket. Maybe one day she will say the opposite of what she wants to happen and that'll be the one time I finally heed her orders! Maybe she should make up a story about bad stuff that will happen (like if I don't pick up all my nails I'll turn into a green frog or something, and it'll effect change- incentives drive people's actions).
The green frog is just one in several animal imagery words Koreans use, like "all women are foxes, all mean are wolves." I love animal imagery when learning language, which is pretty universal in most languages: we learn faster things we can visualize, like equating women to the image of a fox, as opposed to all the different ways to say "agree" or "support" that have so many different variations and require the most brutal method of rote memorization. I feel like if corporate tax law or the California Code of Civil Procedure had animal metaphors and laws that were named after animals or related to animals, I (and many others) would remember a lot more of them. (OR if the punishment for felonies was something incredible like the offenders will turn into green frogs or something)
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
No comments:
Post a Comment