Smartphone Slangs in Korean (스마트폰 신조어)

I’m a huge fan of slangs and newly coined words – nice to be up to date with the new lingo of the Korean language. Given my recent addiction to all things internet, here’s a series of smartphone slangs from the not so new to brand new. 😀

애플빠 vs 갤스족

Not that difficult to get its meaning right? ~빠 (see link) means ‘fanatic’ – loosely translated. So you get all kinds of ~빠 like 첼시빠 (Chelsea Fans) and 빅뱅빠 (I’m one!!).

족 comes from the hanja 族 which means family and basically it means you are part of a group. 갤스 is obviously an abbreviation of Galaxy S. Koreans love their abbreviations.

Kind of interesting that it’s not 애플족 and 갤스빠 right? Apple fanatics are more prominent I guess? 😀

And coming to two very interesting slangs.

약정스계남 and 스마트폰과부

 Can you already guess their meanings from the picture? Click on it for the original Korean article! Let’s look at the easier one 스마트폰과부. It literally translates to smartphone widow. Which means that the wife gets ignored while the husband plays with his newly acquired smartphone, downloading all the apps etc. It’s funny, I actually think that girls spend more time on their smartphone these days.

약정승계남. Hint: The father gets a brand new iPhone 4 while the old phone is relegated to the son. It refers to Koreans’ tendency to switch over to a brand new gadget even before a contract has expired. The word apparently came from KT Olleh (a Korean telecom)’s new policy to allow users to transfer the old iPhone 3GS contract to another person and get a new iPhone 4 contract for their own. So old phones get passed down to the wives, sons etc without a smartphone. With a new phone in hand, I guess the husband will be busy setting it up and downloading all the apps, so the wife turns into a 스마트폰과부 again? I guess the upside is that she now has a new smartphone on her own too! Equality?

스마트맘

With an increasing population of up to date moms, the use of technology is no longer something unfamiliar to them. In the article, they mentioned a service called KidsNote, where mums can now track and be updated of their children’s doings in the kindergarden! The old way used to be paper and pen, where the teacher will jot down stuff in a book, which is passed to the mum when they picked up their kids later. Now, there is no need for paper and pen, everything can be done via the smartphone. Isn’t that awesome? I happen to meet the CEO of the service once. I didn’t talk to him but heard the presentation of their services. 😀

카톡왕따

A combination of two slangs. I’m sure all of us are familiar with Kakaotalk, THE messenger service for Korea. 왕따 means outcast, and hence the phrase means Kakaotalk Outcast. This particular slang has a sad story behind it. Just recently, a Korean high school girl committed suicide because she was receiving verbal abuses from her friends in their Kakaotalk chat group and was basically an outcast. It’s sad how things ended up this way, and high school bullying have taken a new channel.

Yay, so that concludes this post!!! Feedback/comments will be much appreciated. A lot of effort goes into each post. 😛

Source 1 | Source 2