cultural disconnect

Having never seen any of the Scream movies, I was surprised to learn, during a unit on movie genres, that most of my Level 1 students thought "Scream" and its sequels were simply horror films and not horror-comedies. I have no idea whether the horror-comedy genre exists in Korea; more knowledgeable folks should feel free to chime in about what's out there.

Another topic of discussion today was the Korean expression "so-shim," which can occasionally be translated as "small-minded," but is more likely to be used to mean "timidity, cowardice, narrow-mindedness, prudence, circumspection."

The term came up in this circumstance: I was lamenting that none of my students had called me last week about going out for lunch. Before the break, we had planned on doing lunch as a group; because no one had called last week, I joked today that I had become "a sad old man." One student smiled and said, "Small mind!" I understood her to be literally translating "so-shim," and asked her if that's was she was up to. She said yes.

While I'd describe my shtick as "deliberately whiny," I wouldn't have called it "small-minded." This left me at a loss as to how, exactly, the student intended her anglicized "so-shim." Here, too, I'd welcome an explanation from more knowledgeable folks. Keep in mind that she was thinking in Korean and translating literally: "so-shim" comes from the Chinese characters for "small" (so) and "mind" (shim).


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