It Means What!?
Nah-pun-num!
This word doesn’t mean what I thought it did. Growing up, I heard that word from either my mom or other kids and I always thought it meant “bad person”. Yesterday, I found out that it does not.
So a couple of days ago one of the girls in the 6th grade was being mean to me and I thought I would be clever and call her a bad person in Korean, so I pointed at her and said “nah-pun-num!”. She look surprised and then went to tell the 6th grade teacher that I called her that. The teacher didn’t say anything to me, so I just assumed that the girl was surprised that I was saying she was bad. This should have been my first clue that maybe I said something wrong.
Last night I was hanging out with some of the other teachers and they were joking that they thought that one of them was mean when they first met him. So, I was like “no, he’s a good person” in Korean and then I said that he was not a nah-pun-num. Everybody was then like, “nooooo! don’t say that!”. They told me that the num part of the word was a bad word. I told them I had said that to a student that was being mean the other day and then they said that it would have been really bad if I said that to a girl. Great, that’s exactly who I said it to, so now I feel really bad about doing it and I’m still not really sure what it means, but I’m sure the student didn’t appreciate it.
Lesson learned: Not all the Korean words I learned while I was little should be said.
