New Year's Eve in most North American cities builds toward a countdown, a drop or a burst of fireworks, and the whole crowd shouts the final seconds together. Seoul's best-known version …

Most wedding receptions have the same moment. The DJ drops a song that half the room knows by heart, a few people head for the floor, and everyone else stands at the edge doing the quiet math: g…

When an English speaker says "it is what it is," the conversation is usually over. The problem has been looked at, nobody can fix it, and the shrug is the last word. Koreans have a phr…

In English, a dead-end job is the one you stay in because nothing better has turned up. It pays the rent, it leads nowhere, and everybody in the break room knows it. The Netflix series called De…

Most North Americans own an N95 from a smoky summer, know someone who rents a basement suite, have read a horoscope during a bad week and could not tell you who wrote the alphabet. Korea has a c…

Nobody can tell you who invented the ABCs. The Latin alphabet grew out of older scripts over many centuries, and no one signed it, dated it or wrote a preface explaining what it was for. Korea&#…