Wednesday, September 06, 2023

how do you say "brad" in French and Korean?

I had the idea of redoing the binding of my belt buckle when it occurred to me that I could use a simple brad as the pin fastening the leather to the main belt. I was pretty sure our building's stationery stores sold brads, which are a common school/office item even after all these years, but I had no idea how to say "brad" in Korean... which led to the thought that I didn't know how to say it in French, either.

When I went down to see the stationery lady, an old grandma on the first floor, I hadn't looked the word up yet: I simply showed her a picture of a brad that I'd called up on my cell phone. She ended up having to stand on a chair to reach a high shelf, and she brought out a shoebox-sized box full of little boxes like the one you see below. I apologized to the grandma for making her have to use a chair, then I made myself look even worse by not having the W1800 in cash that a single box cost (a bit over a US dollar). I had enough bills and coins for W1750: about a nickel short. The old lady waved off my apology about making her stand on the stool and smilingly told me she'd accept W1750. In fact, she insisted. I felt awful, though, so when I got back to my work station on the second floor, I went right to my piggy bank, took out a W50 coin, and went back down to the grandma, who accepted my payment without a fuss. No use unnecessarily generating bad karma, right?

So as you see in the upper-right corner of the box, a brad is a 할핀/halpin. In French, meanwhile, I discovered that a brad goes by the fancy-sounding term attache parisienne—a Parisian attachment. Bit of a mouthful, that.



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