How I Happened to Get a Cellular Phone

The concept of a language is very wide, not confined to typed letters. That is plain to see. In civilized nations all the gamut of audio-visual and written expressions including signs, signals and sounds are also considered languages.


Let me take one example. 양반 헛기침 (pronounced yangban hutgichim), that is, gentlemen's false coughing, had long been considered an effective method of linguistic expressions in Korean societies. But the decent vocal expression of a language has been superseded by physical knocks learned from the Western societies these days.


The correct interpretation of a language is important. In the same context, the correct expression of a language also is. As a translation critic, I am interested in the origins and originators of all kinds of misinterpretations and misunderstandings as well as in mistranslations and the ways in which they are made.


A roundabout exordium aside, I am going to get down to the thematic crux of my discourse: the responsibility of an author (or authors). Point is that an author is partly responsible for the misunderstanding he or she causes.


People might call it a necessity of the era. I grudgingly agree. But I don't need a set of a mobile phone, do I? Fact is that I am not a mobile but a stationary kind of a citizen. I am not engaged in a busy category of a business, either. I am such a person of leisure, retired and far gone into the latter half of my life.


When the cute little phone set was given to me as a gift by my sons, I was astonished. Flabbergasted might have been an exact feeling I had had at that time. In fact, I had found my face blushing and I had had a little chill by myself.


The reason is that the stupid guy has been such a poor communicator that has resulted in a fiasco that has caused his sons to pay an unexpected sum of money. He had spotted at his family reunion gathering on the occasion of the Lunar New Year's Day a small electronic gadget called a beeper placed on the floor of his living room with its battery room partly fractured.


He should not have showed curiosity. But he had. He had been so heedlessly and indecently intrigued by the "cute little thing" and wanted to know about its effectiveness and validity. All the process of gesticulations and verbal exclamations have misled his sons to think that their leisurely father badly desires to have an up-to-date sleek cellular phone.