Fail #1: I recently had a minor freak-out moment when Mother asked me if I wanted some fresh raw 마 and I thought she was offering me some inhumane platter of horse tartare (which, actually, I would probably have enjoyed, considering that my favorite dish of all time is yukhoe).
Fail #2: Earlier this week, a friend was telling me about the seemingly incongruous popularity of mudang in contemporary Korean society, to which I, mistaking 무당 for the homonymic hanja syllables for 'sugar-free' (無糖), replied, "요즈음 'well-being' 때문에 난린데 무당은 기본 아닌가?" Confusion ensued.
(Kind of reminds me of the time I tried to tell my Chinese host parents that I was planning to visit the Beijing Zoo to see the pandas but misspoke and ended up saying that I was going to admire the local chest hair.)
For those of you for whom none of this makes any sense, here's a new word of the day: Antibabypille, a.k.a. birth control pill.
Gotta hand it to the Germans for efficiency of expression.
