Korean Bamboo English Once More

OMEWHERE NORTH OF SEOUL, KOREA' is the phrase used by Army publicity I agents to make romantically vague the location of some thousands of American troops defending the DMZ or Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea. This study attempts to describe functionally' the language which these men use to communicate with the indigenous personnel or gooks who serve the American Army as allies or laborers. It is based on the memory of my life as a soldier there between April, 1955, and July, 1956, and on an appended 'folk document' which fell into my hands at that time, 'The Story of Cinderella-San.'2 With this functional analysis, I hope to supplement earlier studies which concentrate on vocabulary, chiefly those of Arthur M. Z. Norman and John T. Algeo.3 My memories differ from those of Mr. Algeo on three specific items. First, number one and number ten replaced the number one-number nine system of indicating valuation which he describes. Secondly, short time refers, as he says, to a brief encounter with a Korean girl for amatory purposes. Shorttimer, however, still was used to indicate a person nearing his EDDFEC (Estimated Date of Departure Far East Command), and a person who was within thirty days or so of this date was unofficially allowed to wear a shorttimer's ribbon, the black and gold ribbon wrapped around a bottle of Seagram's whisky. FIGMO was not used to indicate imminent return to the land of the big PX, or the zone of the interior. Thirdly, some terms were probably unique to the situation of a field army, notably the description of illicit nocturnal activity outside the compound as paddy hopping, and the designation slickey boys applied to the children who lived by stealing from the soldiers. Most of the Koreans with whom the average G.I. had a chance to talk belonged to what the nineteenth century called the 'lower orders'; they worked as house

Bamboo · Biology · Botany · Linguistics · Translation Studies and Practices · History · Philosophy

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