Author: Peter

In Post-106, I wrote about the amazing etymology of the word “philistine” (=uncultured). The word’s origin is amazing to me, anyway.    [Post-106 was updated on July 22nd with my discovery of Matthew Arnold’s first mention of the term. The experts say Arnold popularized the word in English].

“Philistine” was German student slang of the 1700s. It was used by Goethe in the modern-English sense in the late 1700s. It didn’t enter English until Matthew Arnold popularized it in the 1860s.

Here are the occurrences of the word, from 1800-to-Present in the corpus of Google-Books. First, “British English” (books published in Britain) and next “American English” (books published in the USA).

Notes:
(1) These graphs are not the same scale. I don’t think there is a way to manipulate that.
(2) The smoothing is 3 [base-year + three years before and after, i.e. “1880” in the above is actually 1887-1893, averaged).
(3) Google-ngram is capitalization-sensitive. The word “philistine” yields totally different results from “Philistine”. Bibles or other references to the Biblical ethnic group would all be capitalized. Uncapitalized uses, then, mean “uncultured”. However, some early uses may actually have been capitalized, before it became fully-entered English as a lowercase derogatory term for an uncultured person.

Is “Philistine” a British or an American Word?
The term was popularized in English via the efforts of Matthew Arnold, so its origin in English is British. It became more American over time, then went back to being British by the WWII era. I have always seen it as a more British word. Here are the ratios, decade-by-decade:

Frequency of “philistine(s)” in British vs. American English [Google-Books]
1880: British, 2-to-1
1890: Parity, British edge
1900: Parity, American edge
1910: Parity, American edge
1915: American, 2-to-1
1920: Parity, American edge
1930: Parity, American edge
1940: British, 3-to-2
1950: British, 2-to-1
1960: British, 3-to-2
1970: British, 3-to-2
1980: British, 2-to-1

The word “philistine” had a huge jump in popularity in the USA in the year 1916, Google-Ngram shows. It went from .00002% (combined singular/plural) words printed in the USA in 1915 to .000106%, then back down to .000027% in 1917 (you can set smoothing to “0” to see this). This is a jump of 5x in one year. It must have to do with WWI. People were writing about WWI and the USA’s possible involvement in it. Some may have alluded to the Philistines of the Bible, who were sometimes at war with the Israelites (e.g., Goliath was a Philistine). Some of the Biblical uses (capitalized) of the word may have been read as lower-case by Google’s imperfect scanning software. Google’s Ngram software is not perfect. A similar bump happened in WWII in Britain, perhaps for the same reason.

Maybe the better word to look at is “Philistinism“, to get around that problem. Here are the graphs:

Both terms clearly emerged in the 1860s, after Matthew Arnold’s essay (if setting “smoothing” to zero, all years before 1863 actually get zero values). By the 1880s, American-English used the term “philistinism” more frequently than British-English, and the two languages used “philistinism” about equally for a long time. Americans started giving up on the term in the 1970s/1980s, but it actually increased in popularity in Britain then.

In post-106, I wrote:

That pastor is the true originator of the word (again, unintentionally), but if anyone deserves credit for its use in English, it’s Matthew Arnold.

From The Bonfire of the Vanities:

I was curious about the origin of the word “philistine”. It means something like “bourgeois” in the way the old Marxists sneeringly used that word, I guess. Right, but what about its origin? I thought it must have something to do with the Bible, but I had no idea what.

It turns out that it doesn’t have much to do with the Bible. In fact, “philistine” has an amazingly-specific history: The term was unintentionally “coined” by a pastor in Germany in 1693 in reaction to a murder. It was popularized in the 1700s as German university slang, and had seeped into highbrow German by the 1800s, and some English-speakers were aware of it. It was first printed in English in 1827. It entered English in-earnest in the 1860s-1870s, via the efforts of Matthew Arnold.

Drawing from this and other quick research I’ve done, I can sketch out this timeline:

Timeline of the Evolution of the Word “Philistine”

• 1693 [Jena, Germany] : A non-student kills a university student in a quarrel.
• 1693 [Jena, Germany] : The Lutheran pastor at the university delivers a funeral oration which involves a verse from the Bible about “the Philistines” (an ethnic group). The word had no connotation at all of “uncultured” yet.
• 1690s and On [Jena, Germany]: Students adopt the word Philister (English: philistine) “to denote non-students”.
• 1700s [German-speaking Europe]: The use of the word “philistine” spreads in German university slang, as a simple shorthand for nonstudents (like “townie” in English), and probably also functions as a kind of shibboleth — this use of “philistine” is esoteric, so only students in-the-know would understand.
• 1797 [Germany]: Goethe and Schiller, Enlightenment men who valued aesthetics, use the word “philistine” (in the modern sense) for the first time in print. They use the term to derisively describe their critics, “old fashioned rationalists…who had no feeling for contemporary poetry”, a definitively modern usage. [I find this here (“Germany as Model and Monster” by Gisela Argyle, note #40), and here].
• 1827 [Britain]: Thomas Carlyle uses the word “philistine” for the first time in English, in an essay called “The State of German Literature” [here, note #40].
• 1863 [Britain]: Writer Matthew Arnold publishes a book on Heinrich Heine in which he also discusses, at length, the German use of the word “philistine”, defining it for readers. [See below]
• 1870s: [Britain] The word “philistine” starts to increase in frequency in the British-English “corpus” [Ngram]
• 1880s: [USA] The word “philistine” starts to increase in frequency in the American-English “corpus” [Ngram]
• 1987: [USA] Author Tom Wolfe uses the word “philistine” in Bonfire of the Vanities (among millions of other uses in the past 150 years).

Here is Matthew Arnold’s 1863 discussion of the word “philistine” in his book on Heine:

“Philistinism—We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing”.  He talks about other possible words to apply to the concept of the “philistine”, but rejects them, and concludes, “I think we had much better take the term Philistine itself.”  Which is what happened.

And so it went that “philistine” (“humdrum people, slaves to routine…stupid and oppressive” in Arnold’s definition above) entered English.

One Australian novel I find published in 1892 has a character saying the following: “Puritanism crushed the artistic sense out of the English, and they are only getting it back slowly by a judicious crossing with other peoples who weren’t Puritanised into Philistinism“. Arnold reported that the word didn’t exist in English in 1863, but by the early 1890s it was being casually used like that. In the 1870s and 1880s, it must’ve been born in English.

Conclusion
The English word “philistine” comes from German university-student slang of the 1700s. There is no case for any other origin, since the first usage of the word in English was in an essay about German literature, and the subsequent usage by Arnold is also lifted from a discussion of German writing. How did it come into German — Apparently from a sermon delivered in 1693, after a murder. Imagine, if that nonstudent in Jena, whoever he was, had not killed that Jena student 320 years ago, we would not have the word “philistine” in English today.

A long-forgotten, unknown pastor in a town in late-17th-century Germany ended up (in effect) “coining a word” that emerged in English two centuries later. I wonder how many other words have such narrow starting points. The most wildly-successful recent word-coiner must be whoever first used “Okay” (which most authorities now believe, I’m told, comes from 1820s or 1830s New England. “Okay” is now a word in almost every language of the world.

Update, July 23: A follow-up post to this is Post-107, “More on the Origin of the Word ‘Philistine’“

In 2011, 2012, and 2013, while living in Korea, I’ve occasionally listened to 102.7 FM, broadcasting from Yongsan Army Garrison in Seoul. It is the radio station of the USA’s “Armed Forces Network” (which is always called by its acronym, “AFN”). They call it “The Eagle”. The slogan you often hear the DJs repeat: “AFN, ‘The Eagle’: Serving America’s Best”.

“DJ” Andrew Branstad
How many times have I heard this, smoothly-delivered from the main DJ:

Branstad is the name of some of my relatives in Iowa. A search shows that this Andrew Branstad is from Mason City, Iowa [Video] [Interview], so, for all I know, he is a relative of mine. As far as I know, the Branstads to whom I’m related are distant relatives of Iowa’s governor.

I think Andrew Branstad is quite a good DJ, the equal of any civilian one in the USA. I’ve been listening to him for nearly two years now. I enjoy listening when he’s “on the air”, even though I’m not the intended audience at all.

America on the Korean FM Dial
The AFN radio station out of Yongsan is enjoyable, well-executed, and professional, given the small target-audience of a few thousand (tens of thousands?) of Americans attached to the U.S. military around Seoul. You’d have no idea that “The Eagle” was in Korea, 98% of the time. My impression is that U.S. Soldiers generally don’t notice Korea. There is seldom any mention of Korea at all on AFN, for example, so it’s no wonder. Relatedly, I notice that the Army people all pronounce “Yongsan”, the base in Seoul, “wrong”. It’s supposed to be “Yohng-sahn” (용산). The Army people say “Young-saen” (“영새언”) or occasionally Yahng-saen” (“양새언”), depending on their accents. (Maybe some are aware they’re saying it wrong, but would think it pretentious to try to imitate the true Korean pronunciation.)

Music
During most of the day, there is no DJ, and top-40 pop music is played. A recorded “Today’s best hits, on AFN”  is the tagline. which is followed immediately by top-40 U.S. music. Every now and then, there are also songs I recognize from the 2000s and 1990s. Somebody at the helm there really loves the 1991 song “Life is a Highway“. Maybe Branstad himself! He’d be about the right age [b. circa 1979] for it to be a youth-nostalgia thing for him (and a befitting song for youth-nostalgia it is). I’ve heard that song many times at all hours of the day on 102.7 FM, “The Eagle”.

Simulcasts; Morning Show at Bedtime
AFN “The Eagle” also sometimes does “simulcasts” of programs from the USA, involving some local U.S. DJs I’d never heard of, playing more top-40 music (one being somebody named Dave Perry, who I often end up hearing, and who has a pretty great radio voice). The main simulcast program I hear is called “Kid Kraddick in the Morning“. It’s on when I get home from work, 10 PM Korea time. Sometimes I listen. Listening into an American “morning-show” at 10 PM in Korea is pretty neat. Once, I was amused to turn it on and hear Psy being interviewed, in English, by the “Kid Kraddick” cast. Psy sounded sleepy, and didn’t sound very fluent in English at the moment.

Totally Irrelevant to Me
I was once on Yongsan Garrison. My retired-Air-Force uncle brought me on while he was here for a week. Yongsan is an amazing place, a true American “colony”. Listening to AFN, I sometimes feel like I’m in the U.S. Army in Korea. The latter is especially true from the “commercials”, which are entirely informational, Army-oriented public-service announcements. Some are on how to avoid getting into trouble, others are info on events upcoming at Yongsan.

All of that is totally irrelevant to me, but then sometimes the least relevant is the most fascinating. Just ask any of my students: Rule #1 for many classes: “Anything off-topic is highly entertaining”!

We’re now past the 150th anniversary of the dramatic Battle of Gettysburg (July 1-3).

I’ve had the ambition for several years to walk from the northern suburbs of Washington, DC to Gettysburg, retracing the footsteps of the army. I attempted this in 2011, and nearly made it all the way. I didn’t have enough time.

I planned to do it in July 2013, the actual 150th, and even made tentative plans to do so with my friend Jonathan S., but alas I was in Korea at the time.  (He’s been having a hard time recently, a kind of frustration about being low on the chain in the post-2008 economy, flailing around and not getting ahead. I know more than a few people in that position.)

That reminds me. Somebody has posted the extended-version of the 1993 film “Gettysburg” onto Youtube. It’s been up for several months,, and has 150,000 views as of today. Four and a half hours, total running time.

The charge of the 20th Maine (as in the painting above) is shown from 2:28:00 to 2:33:00 (two hours, twenty-eight minutes). The 20th Maine was at Little Round Top, on the extreme left wing of the Union Army’s defense line. General Lee chose to attack the Round Top hills on July 2nd. If they’d taken the Round Tops (nobody remember, but there is also a “Big Round Top”), the Confederates could have put artillery on them, threatening the rest of the Union line, probably inducing Union retreat, and thus winning the battle. That’s the implication in Killer Angels.

Around the early 1990s, my dad read the now-classic book Killer Angels, an account of the battle. Although written like fiction, it is essentially nonfiction. There were a couple trips to Gettysburg inspired by that book (I guess). I was too young to appreciate the trips, or much remember them. I remember cassette tapes being played. More driving than walking. Maybe the trip was a stop-off on route to Iowa (where my father’s family lived/lives). That seems likely.

Later, in the mid-1990s, in one of the final years of his life, my mother’s father also read the book Killer Angels. This may be an incorrect memory, but I remember him reading it at my aunt’s house in Chester, CT. A memory I am more sure of is that he finished it in one day, from cover to cover. I was amazed at the time. How could anyone finish a book in one day! I thought. It is several hundred pages.

I finally read that book, too, in 2012. I bought it in Korea. I spent all of 2012 in Korea. The author of that book immortalized the 20th Maine Infantry Regiment and its commander, Colonel (later General) Joshua Chamberlain, who was an academic, a professor, before the war, and spoke several languages.

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Related: I wrote in post-103 about Lincoln’s humility displayed in his correspondence with General Grant, along with my amateur social analysis of American personality virtues

Related: I wrote in post-102 about the man who may well be the worst commander of the U.S. Civil War.

Related: I wrote in post-14 about a ‘relative’ who was killed at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862. I consider him to be the first person bearing my surname to have lived in the USA, and will continue to think so until I see contrary evidence.

Lincoln’s Civil War letters, on the 150th anniversary of the writing of each, are being transcribed/published here:

LincolnsCivilWar.wordpress.com

I appreciate whoever is doing it.

An entry on July 13th, 2013 reproduces a letter by Lincoln to General Grant of July 13th, 1863, exactly 150 years earlier. Lincoln congratulates Grant on his victory in the then-recently-ended Vicksburg campaign. (Grant’s siege of Vicksburg ended July 4th, when the Confederate general surrendered — 30,000 Confederates became prisoners in a day. An entire Confederate field army, the Army of Mississippi, gone.) Lincoln admits he was wrong and Grant was right about strategy.

This warm/humble style is characteristic of Lincoln. What other 19th-century leader would’ve written such a letter?

There is, I think, something very American (old American) about Lincoln’s attitude there. I don’t have the verbal ability to concisely say what I mean, so I will lift the words of R.W. Emerson: “Sincerity, simplicity, and humility without servility.” These were American “folk-virtues”, historically. (This personality-archetype has allowed Europeans these past few centuries to think of Americans as unsophisticated rubes). George Washington was like that. Robert E Lee was like that. A lot of now-living Americans are still like that, but people like that are not “cool” anymore. My father’s extended family is pretty much like that, I think. My mother’s side, too, but less so.

This reminds me of an observation someone had at the informal soccer games I’ve been at in Korea. Most players are British and some are North-American. You often hear the Americans play-down their own abilities (“I’m not very good”…), while the British/Irish players never do. There’s not much difference in actual ability between us all, but you’d think North-Americans were far inferior from attitudes on display. That’s “American humility” at work, maybe.

Humility is “big” in East-Asia, too, of course. After over three years here now, though, it’s my impression that, when push comes to shove, East-Asian humility is usually (1) not sincere, and (2) actually about servility, not humility. I mean, among East-Asians, a person may appear humble or accomodating, but in fact is most often “submitting” because his/her social position demands it (e.g. an employee submitting to the boss), not because he/she is an independent actor in the world who is independently humble. Insincerity also dominates social interactions here, more than I’ve ever seen among my own people. It’s that “face” thing, I guess.

Anyway, no social pressure impelled Lincoln to write to Grant saying “you were right and I was wrong”. No social pressure impelled him, after news of the surrender at Appomattox arrived, ending the war, to order the White House band to play “Dixie” — which he did, amazingly.

Related: I wrote in post-102 about the man who may well be the worst commander of the U.S. Civil War.

Related: I wrote in post-14 about a ‘relative’ who was killed at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862. I consider him to be the first person bearing my surname to have lived in the USA, and will continue to think so until I see contrary evidence.

I nominate Dixon Miles (1804-1862), U.S. Army, for the title

“Worst Commander of the U.S. Civil War”. Here’s why:
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Being drunk during one major battle could actually be forgiven, really, if done once. What he did in 1862 clinches it.

Harpers Ferry (which, for some reason, does not have a possessive apostrophe in its official name) in 1862 was a very strategic town, west of Washington, and right in Robert E. Lee’s avenue of invasion during the Antietam campaign.

Dixon Miles bungled the defense, assigning soldiers to defend completely the wrong places. Stonewall Jackson was able to march in and quickly surround the city with almost no fighting. Jackson took the heights above the town. The Confederates began to bombard Harpers Ferry from those heights. Commander Dixon Miles was drunk again (his subordinates reported). He eagerly decided to surrender without further ado. However:

In summary, Dixon Miles :
(1) commanded troops during two battles,
(2) was probably drunk at both battles;
(3) saw no action at one of his battles (Bull Run),
(4) bungled the defense of Harpers Ferry so bad that he surrendered 12,000 men without a fight;
(5) may have been killed by his own men, in anger over his drunken bumbling.

Stonewall Jackson has a mythical reputation as “invincible on the battlefield”. Looking great is easier if you face “imbecilic” (in the U.S. government’s words) opponents.

Contrasting totally with Miles, Jackson was a teetotaler.

Jackson was famously serious, stern Presbyterian; he was a fanatic driven by the desire to win, and he won just about all the battles he led, usually decisively and often lopsidedly (like Harpers Ferry). The Confederate cause was obviously right, Jackson’s men must’ve thought, if it produced men like Jackson; the Union cause was obviously wrong, the same men (and others) must’ve thought, if the Union cause produced such inept, indecisive generals.

People all react to their leaders. It’s true in the workplace, isn’t it. If a manager is inept, lazy, passive-aggressive, narrow-minded, secretive, selfish, corrupt, grudge-nursing, arrogant, threatening, and cares more about playing “office politics” than actually making the project successful, then — for God’s sake! — any subordinate would end up with low morale. (Note: That string of adjectives, sadly, describes some of my own managers at the language-institute at which I work, particularly the one I’ve elsewhere here called “Stringbean”.

Note also that the wonjang (director) here been seemingly-hungover during business hours, more than a few times. He is always a little surly, but on some days he’s a bit surlier and his hair is unkempt, and he hasn’t shaved, which leads the the wide suspicion of a hangover. I have no way to really confirm this, because he never graces me with the pleasure of conversation. In fact, after two years, I am sure he doesn’t even know my name.

This wonjang would’ve gotten along well with Dixon Miles, anyway.

Early on Sunday, I took a picture of Ilsan’s “suburbs”. (Ilsan is a city northwest of Seoul. I lived there for one year and was back visiting.) Here is the view I had from the tenth floor:

Most of Ilsan’s residents, along with most residents of the Seoul Megalopolis generally, live in buildings similar to those in the background (monolithic highrise apartments). A select few in Ilsan live in actual detached/single-family houses, similar to those in the foreground below (I think these foreground buildings are mixed-use, and may even be multi-family. I assure you that nearby are thousands of smallish single-family houses, though). They have no yard space. A few feet separate the wall of one house from the wall of the next. Most are relatively small by U.S. standards, and sell for $1 million, I’m told.

In the center-left of the photo above is a building with a South-Korean flag on one side and a U.S. flag on the other. It is the “Korea Christian International School” (한국기독국제학교), which I’d never heard of till now. The existence of such a school is testament to the strength of Christianity in Ilsan, and in South-Korea generally. Actually, it’s hard for me to imagine a “Korea Buddhist International School” in Ilsan. If there were one, it wouldn’t be so conspicuous or “self-confident”, I’d imagine. Buddhism is so lethargic/undynamic in Ilsan as to be near invisible, in my experience.

Here’s a (3D model) view from near the same spot, but looking west. You can see a lot of small single-family homes.

A few minutes’ walk from even the remotest of these “suburban houses” allows a resident to find a bus-stop to elsewhere in Ilsan or to Seoul, or to a train station to enter the region’s huge urban rail network. Korea thus has nothing like American suburbs, of course. Some people call Ilsan itself a “suburb”, which is mostly wrong. It may be a bedroom community for Seoul to an extent, but it’s not a suburb at all in the American sense. It’s proper designation is “new city” (신도시). The “new cities” in South Korea are just transplants (onto former farmland) of high-end Seoul, just better-planned and better laid-out.

In my first year in Korea, when I lived in Ilsan, I had a student named Lee H.J., who lived in one of those houses in central Ilsan, I somehow learned. Many of the students were a bit spoiled, but H.J. was particularly bad. She was smart and worked pretty hard, but her attitude was persistently gloomy and usually hostile. She complained almost every day. I started to realize that “heavy is the head that wears the crown”. Being brought up wealthy in South Korea must seem like nothing but a punishment. She went to four or five after-school institutes, and was the object of constant pressure from her mom. If she were poorer, she wouldn’t have been so burdened by all that extra studying.

Lee H.J. (who was in 6th and 7th grade when I taught her in 2009-2010) provided me with a memorable line I’ve pondered ever since. She wrote, “Today is only tomorrow’s yesterday.” She wrote it in an essay. What does it mean? It seems like it could/should have some deep meaning, but when I try to grab onto that meaning, it always conceptually slips through my fingers, like trying to grab onto a cloud.

I snapped the above picture while waiting for bus #1001 in Ilsan on Sunday afternoon. I was returning to Bucheon after visiting at the hospital (see post-99).

It’s a seemingly-humdrum scene, but there’s actually several interesting things going on here.

(1) Teenagers Riding Public Buses. The two umbrella-clutching figures you see are high-school girls, wearing backpacks which are obviously weighted-down by books inside. This was 3 PM on a Sunday. These being Ilsan kids (Ilsan is on the wealthy side), they are no doubt going to one of their many hagwon (supplemental education institutes, such as the one I work at, as of this writing). In the USA, teenagers generally don’t ride public buses, of course. Certainly not well-off teenagers! “It’s dangerous”. I’ve seen elementary-school-age Korean children riding the public buses alone — inconceivable in the USA I know. In Korea, nobody is scared of being attacked on the bus; nobody would think twice about “letting a kid ride the bus alone”. I like the utter safety of general Korean public life, and lament that the USA I knew growing up was not…quite…like…that. That’s the way a society should be.

(2) Monsoon. Look at the sky. All of Sunday looked about like that. And all of Monday, and some of Tuesday….. Korea’s monsoon rains are not usually very vicious, but they are certainly persistently-depressing. There was no break in the total cloud-cover all day, with occasional rain. In my place of birth in Virginia, summer rains tend to be short and intense, then sunny. I am not used to a blotted-out sun for days on end. / Actually, on Sunday I had no umbrella, myself. A young man whose father was in the hospital kindly gave me an extra as I was leaving.

(3) GPS-Based Bus Arrival Notification. At the top of the picture you can see a device that says “1001 — 11분 일산서구청”. “1001” is the bus running from Ilsan to Bucheon’s Sang-Dong neighborhood (near where I live and work), taking about thirty minutes on a good day. The cost is about $2.00. The sign informs the bus rider that the bus is set to arrive in eleven minutes (11분), and it gives the bus’ current location (“일산서구청“, West-Ilsan City Hall). The buses in the Seoul metro area are now all, AFAIK, being tracked with GPS. This is highly useful.

(4) Dieting Advertisement. Points #1, #2, and #3 above are all aspects of Korean culture that are different from what we’re (I’m) used to in the USA. Some things, though, just cross all cultural boundaries: The advertisement on the bus shelter claims that you can lose 10 kilograms (22 pounds) in four weeks!, using their special dieting method.

There are a couple of other things I could comment on in just this humdrum little photo. The wide sidewalks, the very-short shorts of the high-school girl (which — no joke — may have gotten her mother, at that age in the ’70s, into trouble with the police), the greenery (an extension of the amazing urban park anchored on Jeongbal Hill in the middle of Ilsan).

The cliche that a picture is worth a thousand words is proven again.

I spent much of the time since my last post (June 29th) in the far south of Korea. I hope to write about the trip later. It didn’t turn out the way I’d planned, but it was still enjoyable. Sometimes plans are meant to be broken, anyway.

Now I am back near Seoul, back “home” (my Sept. 2011 to Sept. 2013 home).

In the week I was “AFK” (Away From this Keyboard), two people underwent surgeries, as I mentioned in post-98. Both are fine. My sister is now out of the hospital, six days after surgery. My friend Jared is still recovering in the hospital, four days after surgery, but is doing remarkably well.

I visited Jared in the hospital Saturday into Sunday. The visit was a little surreal. The hospital-area I was in (a place for recovering patients to recuperate) felt like part airport and part prison. It is a tight-running ship, though, and a highly-modern facility, the equivalent to the best in the world, I think — not that I know much about hospitals. It also has some great views, from the 10th floor, of Ilsan.

At the hospital, I saw his boss-friend Curt (whom I’d met once before) and his friend Grace (whom I’d heard about many times, but not met). Grace is amazing: She lived in Korea till age 10, then moved to Canada till age 24, and then returned to Korea for the past decade or so. She is the rare example of a Korean who is, from my judgement after interacting with her for five hours on Saturday, absolutely-totally native-level fluent in both languages.

Jared’s surgery made him unable to talk very well. He wrote messages on paper, usually, including many jokes. One was unintentional. Let me relate it here. The subject of Jared’s desktop computer came up. He’d gotten it at Costco. I said “It was really cheap, wasn’t it?” He started writing his answer on his notepad, with Grace and I looking on. I had developed the habit of reading each word as he wrote it. “I — got — it — with — pants.”  Pants? He quickly scribbled something again. Oh! It was actually p-o-i-n-t-s. He got the computer with points (i.e., buy enough and you get something free). The ‘o’ and ‘i’ blended together in the poorly-lit room. The ridiculousness of getting a desktop computer “with pants” (buy a pair of pants, get a computer free!) made us laugh, Jared included.

Coming back from Osan on Sunday, we were dropped off at Seoul Express Bus Terminal, which is near Gangnam. From there, I got on the subway and headed home.

Outside the bus station, I saw this:

June 25th, the anniversary day of the start of the war, was only two days away.

The English on the banner is: “Welcome UN Korean War Veterans”
The Korean on the banner is: “환영 — 6-25전쟁 UN참전용사 방한”

(1) 환영: Welcome
(2) 6-25전쟁 (육이오전쟁): “Six-Two-Five War”. [This is the name most commonly used in South Korea for this war, because it began on June 25th. I’ve always thought that to be a strange way to name a war, after it’s starting date. I can’t think of an example of that from Western history. They also use the term “Korean War”, but less commonly. Every Korean knows what “6-25” means, but most 7th-12th grade students don’t know that it was June 25th of 1950!]
(3) UN참전: Participation in the War by the United Nations [UN]
(4) 용사: Brave Men; Heroes
(5) 방한: Visit (for Pleasure?) to Korea

It’s unclear who was supposed to be riding that bus pictured above, but on Tuesday (June 25th), I did see this:

I noticed that the caption writer wrongly wrote “North Korea began the war 60 years ago today”. Actually, it was 63 years ago today, on June 25th, 1950. This is June 25th, 2013. The very same newspaper reported, the day before, that 37% of adults and 53% of teenagers did not know which year the war began. The day after, a member of that 37% must’ve been at the editor’s desk!

Something interesting from the Korean language:

               참전: Participation in the(/a) War
               용사: Brave Men; Heroes

Combining those two words, i.e, “참전 용사” (cham-juhn-yong-sa) equals the word “veteran(s)”, I see from my (still-working) cell-phone dictionary. It’s not just a “participating in a war” thing, but a “bravery”/”heroic” component. This is not the case in English.

Etymology of the word “veteran” in English: “1495–1505;  < Latin veterānus  mature, experienced.”

I wonder what the word in English for “participant in a former war” was before somebody grabbed the Latin word.

I unexpectedly wound up at a Mexican restaurant near Osan Air Force Base Sunday, after I met my friend Jared.

The restaurant has an actual Mexican manager and actual Mexicans doing the cooking, which is something I’ve otherwise never seen or heard of in Korea (i.e., despite the recent rise in the popularity of Mexican food, managers and cooks everywhere else are Korean). On the advertisement for the place, near the entrance, they boast about it:

We got there in the automobile of a fascinating man named Seungbae, Jared’s friend. Osan is something approaching an hour’s drive south of central-Seoul. This was, I do believe, my longest-ever car ride in Korea.

Both Seungbae and Jared speak Spanish well. Seungbae studied it in university. Jared lived in Mexico for two years, and is fluent. He even taught Spanish in the USA. The two of them had been to this restaurant before. Seungbae introduced Jared to it in 2010, from whom I’d listened back then, in awe, about the “real Mexican cooks”.

Seungbae graciously paid for the meal. He had an ulterior motive for the trip, though: He tried, at length, to enlist the support of the Mexican manager for his latest money-making venture, the details of which I zoned-out on a little bit. All I know for sure is that it’s connected in some way with Mexico, and he needs a Mexican contact. The manager was a kindly, portly, soft-spoken dark-skinned man (who I’d have believed were Arab, if he’d claimed to be). He was born in Mexico but he’s lived in both the USA and Mexico at various times. He seemed to lean more “American” than “Mexican”. (Then again, I’ve never been to Mexico, never even to Texas, and hardly ever to California, so what do I know.) He spoke English well, but only fully-relaxed when Seungbae and Jared addressed him in Spanish.

This Mexican restaurant exists on a promenade adjacent to Osan Air Force Base, in which foreigners easily outnumber Koreans. What kind of foreigners? Some were obviously soldiers/airmen (judging by the haircuts) or their dependents, some were obvious military contractors, but a large share of those I saw were “hangers-on”, like this Mexican manager and his cooks. Many were (to me) of really indeterminate origin. Foreign businesses, and business catering to foreigners, define this street. It is a world unto its own, nothing like the “other Korea” I live/work in.

Jared (who was once in the U.S. Army in Korea) says these areas are called “the Ville” by soldiers. (The now-trendy, but once infamous Itaewon neighborhood, in central Seoul, started out the same, as Yongsan Army Base’s “Ville”, but is now something else entirely. The Itaewon of the 2010s has a Muslim atmosphere on the whole, actually, but that’s another story).

In the leisurely two hours or so we were in the Mexican restaurant, I saw perhaps ten groups of foreigners in and out, versus a single pair of Koreans, women in their 20s. The foreigners all seemed attached to the U.S. Military, either as enlisted men/women or contractors.

This Mexican restaurant at which we ate would be wildly out of place in Korea anywhere except “Ville” areas, or possibly Itaewon (which, again, started as a “Ville”), it seems to me. Whether it would be “not out of place in Mexico” is less clear. Jared, who’s spent a good while in both Southern-California and Mexico, said it was much more like a California-Mexican place that a Mexican-Mexican place. I guess I could’ve surmised that. The place did have a recognizably “American” feel, but certainly was not-quite-as-American as on-base restaurants. I’ve been fortunate enough to have eaten two or three times “on base”, via my uncle (who gets sent to Korea as a contractor sometimes) and my cousin-in-law (who was at Kunsan Air Base last year). I tell you, earnestly, that to walk onto a U.S. Military base in the Republic of Korea is to walk into the USA itself.

At Jared’s suggestion, I drank horchata, a smooth and sweet rice-based drink, which I must confess to have never even heard of before that day. This horchata easily beats the Korean rice-based drinks I’ve tried, soju and Sikyhye.  Seungbae got a Margarita at the recommendation of the manager. Here is a picture of the food, before mine arrived. Jared (across the table) has tacos. I don’t remember what Seungbae got, but it looks good. In Jared’s hand is a horchata. I got one, too,

One reminder that this is Korea was the bell on the side of the table. Very useful. I’ve rarely seen any in the USA.
One reminder that this place serves non-Koreans almost entirely: No kimchi at all was served.

The meal was good; seeing the Osan “Ville” was fascinating, riding such a distance in a car in Korea was novel, and the conversation provided by Seungbae (who spoke at length about Korean history and any other topic that came up) and Jared (who always has something interesting to talk about) was pleasant.

It was a good trip. It reminded me of being in the USA.

The great Korea-focused blogger “Gusts of Popular Feeling” (who is from Canada, and I think is a professor in Seoul) has just posted a link to a number of digitized books about Korea from the 1970s and prior.

One of them is an informational booklet about the 17th group of U.S. Peace Corps volunteers in Korea from around 1971. Here is a link to a PDF of the booklet. It consists of a short introduction, a lot of pictures, and then a profile of each volunteer in this 17th group of Peace Corps volunteers to Korea.

One of the pictures jumped out at me:

He is imitating the typical Korean (East-Asian) picture-taking pose. (It is common for Koreans today to put up two fingers like that in photos, often near their eyes.) That was my first thought. Actually, he is almost certainly making a symbol that has long since become an anachronism in the USA, the “peace sign”. It took me a few moments to realize that. When I first saw it, I quickly speculated about whether Koreans already doing this in the early 1970s and whether he was imitating them. I was surprised, because I imagined the Koreans’ “showing two fingers for a photo” habit started much later (though I have nothing to base that on, actually). No, it’s just a run-of-the-mill peace sign.

This man may be Cris Groenendaal, judging by page 70 of the booklet, which I will reproduce here:

Translation:
Cris Groenendaal (from Erie, Pennsylvania) graduated from Allegheny College, majoring in English Literature, it says. It lists the countries he had visited before Korea: the UK, France (spelled 불란서 here, which I had to look up — an awkward/old spelling), Germany, Greece, Switzerland, Yugoslavia, Austria, and Italy (spelled 이태리 here, which copies the English pronunciation — today Koreans call it “Italia”, not “Italy”). It says he could speak German and French, he had studied at Exeter University, and he had worked in a bank. His hobbies are listed as tennis (written as “정구”, an obsolete word I had to look up; Koreans today use the English word “tennis” [테니스, te-ni-suh)]). ping pong, swimming, singing, and either “guitar” or “other” (기타 can mean both).

I hope this man, who’d be 65 as of this writing, pardons me for prying into a snapshot of his life 40-some years ago.

Gusts of Popular Feeling also links to a neat little essay by Amy Lennard Goehner, a volunteer there in 1974-5.

The Peace Corps was discontinued in South Korea in 1981. Two years later, it stopped in Malaysia.

Both my parents were Peace Corps volunteers in Malaysia around the time the booklet I link to above was made. The Peace Corps website says that 4,067 American volunteers served in Malaysia from 1962-1983. I’ve known two of them since the day I was born. They both speak nothing but highly of their time in Malaysia. What I’ve done in Korea for three (non-consecutive) years is something similar, I like to imagine.

J.H. (American, born 1987) was always polite, to a fault, to the Korean managers. He is my coworker till next Friday.

J.H. missed not a single class for illness or any other reason in 19 months, and he was popular with the kids. He maintained a deferential politeness towards, and avoided any confrontation with, management (which allowed them to push J.H. around in ways I won’t go into). He didn’t fight when “corners were being cut” against us, instead shrugging it all off, even when I and others were ready to fight — “better to keep the peace”, he reasoned. Now, as thanks for all his loyalty and deference, he’s received a final kick in the stomach, right as his foot is out the door.

Next Friday is actually the last day of not only the magnanimous J.H., but also of the wiry M.R. (born 1971), who is occasionally called “Steve Jobs Teacher” (see post-21). M.R. has been very helpful to me in the past year, but he was antagonized by Korean management literally from day-one (in a humorous anecdote I could relate another time).

Both J.H. and M.R. will remain in Korea, and start different jobs. They are both a bit sick and tired of this particular place of employment, especially M.R. Still, both have served their time loyally.

J.H.’s “Golden Kick in the Stomach”
At about 3:15 PM yesterday, I overheard a heated discussion in the 4th-floor teachers’ room, between J.H. and one of the many Korean “managers”. They were alone in the teachers’ room. I don’t know where everybody else was. I only heard bits and pieces of their exchange, as I was in a classroom preparing something at the time. The Korean manager was that pernicious “stringbean of a woman” I briefly mentioned in post-61.

They were arguing in there. J.H. was still trying to be polite, but was getting more and more flummoxed.

A few minutes later, J.H. told me what the fuss was. Management is insisting it will not pay him his contractually-assured return-airfare, worth $1,200. This was confirmed when he met Miss Stringbean again at 10 PM, after work. I met J.H. after work for an hour or so to hear about the situation and give advice. Management had a few half-baked (technical) reasons for why they were refusing to pay. J.H. speculated they’d cooked-up half of them between 4 PM and 10 PM that very day. One was that J.H. is staying in Korea so he “wasn’t entitled to the airfare”. He is actually going home, anyway, in the first two weeks of July, to visit. His new job starts in mid-July. There is nothing in the contract stipulating some kind of “forfeiture of airfare for taking another job in Korea”. An absurd proposition. The other pretexts given were equally dubious. Management refuses to pay him even a portion of the airfare. Unethical. Illegal.

Also cruel. Being (in effect) so openly “screwed out of” an expected $1,200 in compensation is never fun, but it is particularly depressing for J.H. After all, for 19 months he tried so hard to be deferential and acquiescent, as I say above. He didn’t fight when he could have, over Management’s refusal to give legally-required vacation days, or over Management’s skimming-off-the-top regarding pay. He let it all go. I was also affected by those things, and I was committed to fighting…. (alas, perhaps it’s better to continue with that another time, if I ever care to).

J.H. is depressed and angry. He is now on the warpath, thinking seriously of going to court.

A “golden handshake” is a gift of money in appreciation of somebody’s service, when they are leaving a company. “Hey, thanks for your good work. Here’s a cash bonus.”  This situation calls for an opposite term, i.e. for “Hey, thanks for the loyal service and all, but we’re going to screw you out of a bunch of your contractual compensation anyway“.

I’d like to propose the phrase “golden kick-in-the-stomach“ for what has happened to J.H.

Note:
In 2010, I finished my first contract. I told the boss I’d buy my own plane ticket. I told her it was near $1,100, and the boss simply deposited that sum in my bank account. I wonder what my return-airfare-money “experience” will be this time, in light of J.H.’s recent trouble….

The summer solstice is today. That’s the “longest day of the year” for most humans (i.e., Northern-Hemisphere-ites), when the Sun reaches its northern maximum.

The precise time of day when the sun hits its maximum, I found, was Friday, June 21st of 2013 at 2:04 PM Korea Time (1:04 AM June 21st, Eastern USA Time). I arrived at work shortly before 2 PM. When the clock struck 2:03. I decided to slip out of the teachers’ room, and mark the occasion by going to a classroom window, to catch a glimpse of the Sun. I didn’t quite see the Sun. I got a largely-obstructed view of a semi-grey, indistinct sky. At least it was the sky.

There are two things I find of interest on this topic:

(1) The Word “Solstice”. English uses the pretentious Latin word “Solstice”. Why use the Latin? German, characteristically, uses an old-Germanic formation for this event, “Sonnenwende”. That might be translated as “Sun Turning Point”, or simply “Sun Change”. (In today’s German, the word “Wende”, when it stands alone, refers to the German Democratic Republic’s disintegration, “die Wende“). That English so often chooses Latin words over simpler Germanic ones (even when Germanic ones will do), is something I’ve often pointed out to more-advanced students.

(2) Its Significance as a “Holiday”. The Pagans in Europe famously celebrated seasonal-holidays, like Summer Solstice. My own surname is related to the word “Yule”, an old-Germanic name for the Winter Solstice. Summer Solstice supposedly inspired the creation of Stonehenge and other megaliths.

Paganism and its seasonal holidays were on the way out in the centuries of the first Milennium AD. Supposedly, the early Church fathers chose the December 25th date to smooth over Pagan-Christian relations. Jesus’ birthdate was unknown, but being set by the Church at the same time as the traditional Yuletide festivals of Europe, must’ve led many Pagans to feel “these Christians are coming around!”

The joke was on the Pagans, of course. Nobody celebrates these holidays anymore. However, I’d argue that the spirit of their celebrations lives on in “proxy holidays”, as change of seasons hits deep with us (see post-76 “Memorial Day as a Proxy Holiday, Or, Pagan Habits Die Hard”). I mean, with us humans who live in seasonal climates, especially in northern latitudes. For Northern-Latitude-ites, late June days are very long. Why not celebrate?

Actually, it’s not true that “no one celebrates these holidays [with a spiritual component]”. The news article from which I stole the above image of Stonehenge is of a kind I’ve occasionally seen in the past ten years. It gawks at the activities of so-called “Neo-Pagans” in Europe. Eighty thousand British listed themselves as Neo-Pagan on their recent census, A BBC article from this year discusses Greek Neo-Pagans celebrating solstice. It says:

The article also notes that

The Question of When Korea’s Monsoon Begins continues, for some reason, to haunt me, following post-89 and post-90. I remain puzzled about whether the first Monsoon (Jang-Ma [장마] in Korean) on June 17th of this year was “early” or not.

To satiate my curiosity, I tried to find, via online news reports, the reported first Jang-Ma days in Korea over the past ten years. Caveat: I am not so sure about 2011’s truly-very-early date, which may only have influenced Jeju Island.

Dates of the Start of Monsoon Seasons, Jang-Ma, in Mainland Korea
2005: June 26th
2006: June 21st
2007: ?? — I could not find it in the English press
2008: June 17th
2009: June 25th
2010: June 19th
2011: June 10th — “the monsoon…arrive[d] earlier than at any time since the KMA began compiling statistics in 1973”
2012: June 30th
2013: June 17th

The average “Monsoon season onset day” in the past decade, if excluding 2011, is June 22nd; if including 2011’s, it’s June 21st. Both are earlier than the historical average of June 25th-29th. That date range is according to this, which analyzes the entire period of 1778-2004 for Seoul.

This is a pretty comprehensive academic study, and finds a June 25th-29th average onset day. The government says that the Jang-Ma season for central Korea started, on average, June 24th/25th in the 1981-2010 period.

1778-2004 Average: June 25th-29th
1981-2010 Average: June 24th-25th
2005-2013 Average: June 21st-22nd

My final conclusion: The June 17th 2013 Monsoon was “early”, but not very early. More interestingly, the recent average start day of the Jang-Ma season has been getting earlier, if my attempt to analyze the data is correct. This does not point to a general “warming trend”, because, also ancedotally, I can say that winter was very, very long this year (see post-34 and post-63). Koreans themselves have been saying spring starts later and later each year recently.

In the course of my reading, I saw that Korea’s rainfall is higher today than it was in the 1800s:

That’s 10% more rain per year in the past century than earlier. Why? I have no idea.

This 85-mm increase in summer rainfall could be interpreted as more days of “regular” (non-torrential) rain, or as more days of true Monsoon, of torrential rain. The following may suggest the latter:

I’d like to know more on the topic, but my mind is exhausted from looking to this “First Jang-Ma Day Question” I’ve been on, so I’m throwing in the towel. If someone else who may reads this knows or can guess, leave a comment.

In post-89, I noted that Korea’s skies were blackened by the Jang-Ma [장마], or Monsoon early this year.

That was June 17th. A day before, in India, the same thing happened, also early:

 India’s first monsoon of 2013 was a month early.

Is June 17th really “very early” for Korea? I said it was, though I wasn’t quite sure of that when I was writing post-89, I must confess. I was just repeating what I’d heard. Now I find a scholarly article (from 2006) that says the onset of the Jang-Ma season in Korea (i.e., the first Monsoon of the year) has always occurred in the window of “late June to mid-July” (after which a few more weeks of regular Monsoons follow). June 17th is outside that window, and two to three weeks earlier than the overall-average onset time of early July. June 11th, the onset date in 2011, is way outside that window.

I wrote, in post-89, that people were “speculating about earlier arrival [of the Monsoon season as] being connected with climate change.”

In my hunt for educated-speculation on earlier-Monsoons and climate-change, I find the following from June 25th, 2008 in Bangladesh:

Is it true that there has been a true “gradual advance” of the Monsoon season in Asia, and that 2011 and 2013 (June 11th and June 17th Monsoon season onsets, respectively) were not just flukes? If so, isn’t this evidence of “climate change”, by definition?

All those guidebooks that say Korea’s Monsoon season begins in July draw from established knowledge, which may no longer be correct.

“Would you be up for that?”  is what I asked.
“Yeah, I’m down for that”, he replied.

I was puzzled that these two opposite-seeming phrases could mean exactly the same. I’d never thought about it.

Translation into simple-English:
“Do you want to do that?”
“Yes, I do want to do that.”

After the matter was settled (he “did want to do that”), I noted with interest our use of opposite words (“up” and “down”) to mean the same. How could this have come about? A linguistic puzzle, perhaps.

A thirty-second analysis followed, twice the time spent on the fifteen-second conversation itself. He said that “up for that” sounded old-fashioned to him. He claimed it was something his father would say. (“He” is the 23-year-old Californian I’ve alluded to on these digital pages before.) / He is from the San Francisco Bay Area. He further proposed that “down for that” may be a more Pacific-Northwest-centric phrase, befitting the supposed laid-back attitude of the natives of that region (“down” being the more “laid-back”, I guess). “Up for that” sounds more optimistic and energetic, though, doesn’t it? “Down for that” sounds a little negative, a little sarcastic, a little cynical, a little suspicious…

“Down for that” is a phrase I have never used. It’s always sounded “street” to me, by which I mean not-far-removed from ebonics. If I used “down for that”, I might as well call people “homeys” and so on. I’m not a “whigger” (as Whites who ostentatiously imitated Black speech were called, disparagingly, in my school-days). On the other hand, phrases / words from Black-slang have frequently shifted into general (White) usage in the past century or two, haven’t they.

That now-ubiquitous word “cool” is one of the words that comes from Black slang, so they say. When did it become “non-racial” and become commonly used by (non-“whigger”) Whites? I don’t know. 1970s? Another linguistic puzzle.

What seems obvious to me, anyway, is that there have thus always been people alive who’d developed their linguistic-sensibilities before the crossover occurred. White men of my grandfathers’ generation (both of mine were born in the 1910s-USA) would never have used the word “cool” unless the temperature were involved. Maybe I’m just a bit too old, too, and this “down for that” has been, unbeknownst to me, becoming “mainstream” these past years, after I’d already cast my lot against it. / I can’t imagine ever bringing myself to use it; I’d feel like a true idiot.

Update: Post-88 “Up For This, Down For That (Part II)” is a follow-up to this post.