A Bad Attitude
Gotta be irreverent & argumentative to mess with language like this, and willing to fight for every turn of phrase. A hangover will do that!
Caffeine
The best writing always goes on in a coffeeshop – wired and writing… Mongo need coffee. Coffee good.
A Pen
A pen! A pen to write the damn book! How else are you going to… oh, or a computer. Yeah, I guess that’ll do.
Time
To write shit, you need a helluva lot of time. Time and money – how else are you going to buy the fuckin’ coffee?
Where it came from
Always thought that the phrasebooks to learn Korean were a bit of a miss, and if I was going to really learn the language, I had to study the word on the street. Then I thought, what the hell, I might as well spread the word. Planned and prepped, but didn’t really get going till I found an intrepid co-author in my philosophy student.
- How well I think I know Korean… 83%
- How well I really know Korean… 61%
- Repetoire of slang at my disposal… 97%
- Ability to piss people off with a simple phrase… 100%
PETER N. LIPTAK
Author
An avid traveler and poet, Peter lives and writes in Seoul and draws on Korea’s people, language and culture as a source of inspiration, linguistic and otherwise. Keen on dialect and borrowed words in language, he did an MA in Korean Studies at Yonsei University.
SIWOO LEE
Co-Author
A young philosopher who studied international management at KyungHee University, Siwoo Lee has taken a profound interest in the symbolism of language, combined with his fascination with foreign tongues and his sophisticated command of slang, has led him to delve into the world of A Rat’s Tail.
This Guy
Inspiration
Rather than thank all the fine people who helped along the way, feeding me foul words, sharing slang and generally telling me where I can go, I thought why not this guy… After all, who would even know about oppa and gangnam and well Korea if it wasn’t for Psy. (P’sigh)