::A Geek in Korea::

One of the more frustrating things about teaching smart students is when they think they are much smarter than you are and want to show everyone their skill. I want to encourage students to do their best and to always try hard, but when they spend the class trying to put me in my place I get annoyed. For example, a student was trying to redefine the definition of the word “grandfather” in my class.

This 10 year old student said that his father is now a grandfather. I asked if the student was now an uncle. He said, “No, I’m not an uncle. I don’t have any brothers or sisters.”

“Oh, so are you a father? How could your father be a grandfather unless you had a child? The only way your father becomes a grandfather is if you have a child of your own. You are only ten years old, and you don’t even have a girlfriend.”

He sighed and tried to explain to me how ridiculous I sounded. “I don’t have a baby! Of course, it was my Uncle’s daughter. She’s my sister cousin. So, my sister cousin had a baby. A sister cousin had a baby, so my father’s daughter, my sister cousin is my father’s daughter niece, is a grandfather! Don’t you see? It’s so easy!”

No, his family isn’t a bunch of inbred weirdos. Had I not known what was going on in Korean, he would have had me convinced his family had a few wreaths in the family tree however. He had a new baby “sister cousin”. What he really meant to say is that he had a new “second cousin”. His first cousin, his “Uncle’s daughter” had a daughter, who he was also calling a “little sister”.

The word cousin exists in Korean (sacheon) , but you talk to an older female cousin with the same title of respect you use to talk to an older sister. There are probably specific titles for all of these things in Korean as well, but I have no idea what he should have been calling this new addition to his family in Korean. I’m just an English teacher. I don’t work to translate family trees. All I know was that he was translating the honorific title from Korean to English, but using the wrong word. He kept thinking everyone was his sister instead of “cousin” like we would describe the family.

Since his “sister” had a “baby”, that means his “father” was now a “grandfather” as long as you have a very strange definition of fatherhood that doesn’t actually imply a direct lineage. I told him that he wasn’t using the word “Grandfather” correctly, and drew a family tree listing out words like “great uncle” and “second cousin”. I told the student he needed to be more accurate with his descriptions of his family when talking to other foreigners, because he’d probably get a very different reaction from someone else.