Korean “Fighting!”

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Debbie and I’m from Boulder and I’m obsessed with K-dramas. It’s my guilty pleasure. It’s intellectual, of course, because I’m reading subtitles, right? So my husband doesn’t understand why I’m not fluent in Korean already. Or for that matter, if I don’t know any words other than thank you, which is kamsamidan is the only word I know after all the Korean shows I watch.

My question is related to what I hear on these shows. The South Koreans use the word fighting, like F-I-G-H-T-I-N-G, fighting, and they make like a fist, fighting, in English when they want to say good luck or go get them. And I’m thinking it stems from the American GIs during the Korean War, but would like to check with my favorite grammar experts.

So you’re watching Korean dramas, K-dramas. When do they say fighting? What’s happening when they say what sounds like the English word fighting? Fighting. So it’s like when they’re saying, go get them or good luck. You know, like you’re about to try something new and they want to say good luck. So they say fighting.

Yeah, so it’s not the same way that we would say fighting. So they’re not using it as a noun or the present participle of the English verb to fight. They’re using it kind of as an imperative, like as a cheer. Yes, exactly. It’s like, go get them tiger, or do it, or come on team, or go, go, go, go for it. Exactly. Right. Right.

So it’s a bit of Konglish, a mix of Korean and English. That’s K-O-N-G-L-I-S-H. And Matt Van Valkenburg of the blog Gusts of Popular Feeling has found a couple of early uses of it in Korean from 1972 and in English from 1975. So it has a pretty long history. It doesn’t go back as far as we’ve been able to find to the Korean War, but American GIs have been in Korea since the Korean War. So there’s a chance it comes from them, but it could also just come from just the pervasiveness of American media in Korean culture since the war. It doesn’t even have to be from the war itself or from the American GIs being there. So I think more than likely it just came from Koreans watching American sports and American television shows, American movies.

Okay, well, that makes a lot of sense. And just for everybody who’s listening, they don’t spell it when it’s transliterated in back into Latin letters. They don’t spell it like we spell it. It’s often spelled H-W-A-I-T-I-N-G or P-A-I-T-I-N-G. And it sounds like three syllables instead of two. So it might be like ho-i-ting or pa-i-ting, like that. Yes. And sometimes it sounds like whiting, like with a W almost. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Kind of aspirated at the beginning. Yes.

Well, Debbie, thank you so much for calling and sharing that. Appreciate it. Thank you so much. Take care now. Enjoy your shows. Thanks so much. Bye. All right. Bye-bye. Call us, 877-929-9673.