Slang

My sister and I decided to get some drinks for the movies we rented last night. We went down to the 7-11 downstairs and picked out a couple things. When we went to the counter, we didn't think anything of the Korean girl working there. All of a sudden she asks us, in the most PERFECT english voice, "Do you wanna buy a bag?" I looked at my sister and she looked up from her wallet with a shocked look on her face and answered, "Oh ummm yes." (In Korea, you have to buy plastic bags if you don't bring your own.) She places our bottles in the bag and then says, "Thank you very much, have a nice day." My sister and I were like "!!!!!" Hearing someone speak English that well in Korea, an hour away from base is like seeing a peso in North Carolina. She even had the whole slang thing down: wanna. The only other straight-up Korean I've ran into that can speak with English slang is my stepmom.

How do people pick up on slang in other languages? I know some Korean, French, Italian, but I don't even know where to begin when it comes to slang. Here, for example, we say, "I'm gonna sing 'till the cows come home." First of all, why would cows come home? Where are the cows coming from? First-time English speakers will have a huge conundrum with this phrase. Gonna? How are they supposed to know that 'gonna' actually means "going to." How do you get 'gonna' from that? It always makes me laugh when I hear my stepmom say things like, "Ew what a dinky dress," or, "This piece of crap notebook is falling apart." I think it's kind of funny how fast some foreigners pick up on English slang.

What I hate the most, however, is when they learn a cuss word. They sound like little 5 year olds who hear it for the first time and decide to add the word to their everyday vocabulary. I was walking down a street one time with shopping stores all over the place. Korea has these hustlers that bring customers into the stores that you can't see from the street. Well, one time I was walking by and one of the hustlers told me, "Hey bitch! Good American size. Bitch clothes." I was like wtf?! I was about to slap him but I remembered I was in Korea haha! Then I passed by a store named "Fucking Lovely." Fucking lovely, huh? It's weird how there's so many languages and so much slang, I always wonder how people figure this stuff out. Sometimes we can get lost in translation or found in miscommunication. I don't get it either.