So, I haven't really been following the rookie groups this year, but I've been getting messages from After School Club about 'Mad Town' being on their show next week so I decided to check them out and... they're really good! And funny. And talented. And just seem to be all around nice, hard-working, good-looking hip-hop idol group.

BUT lots of people have been not taking them seriously because their debut song is called YOLO. And I just HAVE TO SAY THIS:

*deep breath, chill pill taken*

YOLO in Korea doesn't have the same connotation of stupidity/sarcasm like it does in the West. Korea borrowed the word, and it's meaning, and then made that meaning ONLY reflect a meaning of 'sieze the day' or 'carpe diem' (two phrases that do 'mean' the same as yolo, but that the Western world doesn't have any problem with). This same process of subtle change has happened for lots of words that Korean has borrowed from foreign languages, and it's a process called 'semantic narrowing'. This kind of lexical borrowing happens in ALL languages, e.g in Japanese (fighto = do your best), German (mobbing = workplace harassment) - in the 21st century, pretty much no language is free of foreignisms that have had their meaning changed.

I just wanted to write this long explanation because my actual degree was in Linguistics and I never get to use what I learned from it - except for times like now! Anyway, I hope that in the future more people can understand that though Kpop can at times be a little crazy, sometimes that crazyness is intentional and sometimes there is a real cultural/linguistic difference that non-Korean viewers might not be aware of.

And here's a link to their MV

http://youtu.be/Prg4bxe_yhg

OK, well hopefully next time I'll be publishing a story, not just a blog post!

xoxo S