"There's a typhoon coming, but, there is no typhoon coming, but," says my wife. Of course, she has spoken in Korean, but this is the best rendering into English I can give of what I think I heard.
"Does that really mean something in Korean?" I ask her, carefully sincere in my tone. What she has said seems to me a weird way to say anything, but my Korean is not so good. Previously such seemingly weird phrasing might have earned her a "What the hell is that supposed to mean?" But I've learned that such direct questions don't get me a useful response.
"I mean 'There was supposed to be a typhoon coming, but it looks like there will be none.' " she explains, rephrasing it in more standard Korean.
"Oh." I say. And then maintaining sincerity. "Did you misspeak the first time, or would someone else have understood what you said?"
"They would understand. What else could it mean?"
This speaks to my difficulty with the language. I have always complained that there are a hundred ways to say the same thing in Korean. But if the rule is something-means-something-because-what-else-could-it-mean, then it doesn't really matter how many ways there are to say it, it only matters how many ways there are not to say something else, and this seems an unreasonable level of entry to me.
On a good day, I might say I know 5 percent of the Korean. In a given conversation I maybe know up to 85 percent of it. For a tricky conversation like one that comes up in a faculty meeting, it is more like 30 percent. But if something means something because it could not mean anything else, then I really have to know all of the Korean.
"It might mean something naughty." I suggest, hopefully.
"People our age don't ever mean anything naughty," my wife says, once again killing what little tendrils of hope I manage to find growing up between the cracks of the cement of daily life.
