UPDATED: Korea-obsessed British university student gets surgery to become Merong Girl (메롱걸)

ORIGINAL POST:
One of those popular urban legends about South Korea is that kids in English-obsessed South Korea are getting their tongues snipped (a procedure called lingual frenectomy) in order to pronounce English more accurately. I call it an urban legend because, while there certainly are people who have gotten the surgery done, it has reached the point where there are more stories about this supposedly popular Korean procedure in English-language media than there are people who have actually done it. I think.

Now the British media has brought us a twist on this story. It seems one university student in England is obsessed with Korean culture and learning Korean (see all those Korea books she's carrying), and (wait for it...) she has had a similar tongue-lengthening surgery in order to speak Korean better.

From the UK's Daily Mail:

Student Rhiannon Brooksbank-Jones dreams of living and working in South Korea once she finishes university, even though she has never visited the country.

But while taking language lessons, the 19-year-old found that she couldn't pronounce certain crucial sounds in the Korean alphabet.

Her dentist suggested it may be because she was born with a slightly shorter than average tongue, caused by having an unusually thick lingual frenulum - the flap of skin that joins the underside of the tongue to the floor of the mouth.

After discussing the matter with her parents and language tutor, Rhiannon decided to undergo an operation to correct the condition, despite the fact it has never caused her any problems in speaking English.

She underwent a lingual frenectomy, which involves making an incision in the flap of skin. As a result, Rhiannon's tongue is now about 1cm longer, and she can say words that were impossible before.

Rhiannon, of Beeston, Nottingham, said: 'I'd been learning Korean for about two years, and my speaking level is now high, but I was really struggling with particular sounds.

'It became apparent after a little while that I was having trouble with the Korean letter 'L', which is very frequent and comes from a slightly higher place in the mouth than the English 'L', and that my tongue was too short.

'My pronunciation was very 'foreign', but now I can speak with a native Korean accent. The surgical procedure was my only option. It's not like you can stretch your tongue otherwise. I just decided enough was enough.

Poor lingual frenulum, you're hated on two continents.

Anyway, while in Korea I imagine a lot of anglophones would scratch their head and say, "What the...?!" for the same reasons we might do the same about six-year-olds with English-obsessed Korean mothers having the surgery (if you have a tiger mom, expect to get mauled a bit), back in the United Kingdom people are hemming and hawing about this surgical procedure having been covered by the national health insurance scheme. Apparently this Nottingham native is some sort of modern-day medical Robin Hood: stealing from the rich National Health Service and giving it to her poor, unable-to-pronounce ㄹ self.

Okay. But me? I smell a carefully crafted ploy by a young, smart, and reasonably attractive young lady to launch a career in Korea's public sphere: she's cute (never hurts with any job), speaks Korean pretty well (a plus for doing anything other than English teaching), has considerable interest in Korean culture (an ego massager for a large portion of the Korean masses), and has the kind of figure many Korean men like in Caucasian women (that's a euphemistic way of saying she has a good-sized chest while falling within the range of thin to nothing larger that chubby-cute). And I like her glasses.

So in conclusion: Get in touch with me, Rhiannon Brooksbank-Jones, and I'll make you a star.

Seriously. And I've already christened you 메롱걸* (the only alternative is 혀녀). That's what we call 서비스.

* To understand what is 메롱 (merong), see the picture below:

above: South Korea's most famous English teacher

UPDATE:
This story has also become a post at The Marmot's Hole. Human rights lawyer Ben Wagner, who is highly skilled at finding bigotry where no one else does, has revealed that Merong Girl is promoting racist viewpoints:

All the best in to Rhiannon in her Korean language studies, but I wish she hadn’t chosen to perpetuate to the myth that race is somehow tied one’s ability to speak a language with native fluency. Ironically it’s an allegedly short “Korean tongue” which supposedly makes it difficult to produce the English L/R sounds, the Brit’s “short” tongue should have made her a natural if any of these nonsensical theories had any scientific basis.

Thank goodness for Mr Wagner, or else I wouldn't have realized Ms Brooksbank-Jones was perpetuating race-based myths. Here I thought that the reason for the surgery was that her tongue (i.e., not the tongue of most White people in England) was "shorter than average" and that she (i.e., not most White people in England) had "an unusually thick lingual frenulum." Now I realize she's some sort of White Inferiorist. I may have to rethink launching her career.

Is North Korea planning to launch a chemical attack in Seoul during the G20?

The British press seems to be abuzz with the prospect that the G20 summit in Seoul is going to be attacked by North Korea, via chemical weapon-filled balloons.

From the Daily Mail:

A bizarre plot by North Korea to attack the G20 summit using balloons filled with biological or chemical weapons emerged last night.

The claim that ageing tyrant Kim Jong-Il will attempt to disrupt the gathering — attended by David Cameron and other world leaders — has been taken seriously by Western diplomats.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has asked China, North Korea’s chief ally, to rein in Kim. And security is now at red alert for the conference in the South Korean capital Seoul.
Kim Jong-Un, Kim’s third son and expected successor, is thought to have been ordered to find ways to overshadow the meeting.

His father’s secretive regime has acted aggressively in the past at times of internal change, external tension or when the rival South is the focus of world attention.

I'm really torn by this. Although the history is there — the (alleged) downing of Korean Air flight 858 right before democratic elections in the South and less than a year before the 1988 Olympics, the sea battle right before the 2002 Korea/Japan World Cup began, etc. — when they start attributing this to Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong-un, I start to roll my eyes and wonder if they're not just sitting around drinking copious amounts of soju and reporting as news potential scenarios they've pulled out of their butts. Indeed, I can imagine just how and where this story "emerged" last night.

As I've made it clear, the Western media has been exaggerating Kim Jong-un's prominence and influence so far. He is, as I've said, the Kim Who Wasn't There, and it's highly doubtful that he's plotting ways to kill a bunch of world leaders, including his regime's benefactor Hu Jintao.

I think you need to stop re-watching all the Austin Powers movies. I mean, really, are the actual events just too boring for you? You've got half-naked PETA protestors and an ajumma trying for self-immolation.

UPDATE:
BJiT (British James in Texas) had this to say bout the Daily Mail:

Conservative, scaremongering and some say bigoted. They're not necessarily unreliable, though they were running paranoia about chemical and biological weapons when I was growing up...

So essentially (and he says I can quote him on this, even though he was just affirming my quote), they are like the UK's dead-tree version of Fox News.

The British aren't coming

There is a certain tightness to the great anglophone alliance — the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and, to a lesser extent, New Zealand, and Ireland have for at least a century (usually) been as close as lips and teeth. Great Britain in particular could be counted on for support in military operations in places like Korea, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

But there are new concerns that with a planned ten-percent slash in its military budget, the UK may no longer be America's go-to gopher in the future.

From the New York Times:

Plans by the British government to make significant cuts in defense spending have spurred concerns among American military experts about Britain’s ability to carry out its role as the United States’ most dependable ally.

A wrenching government spending review has pitted Britain’s army against its navy, spawned a series of leaks to the British media and raised the question of whether the military that emerges from the budget cuts — expected to be 10 percent to 20 percent of current outlays — will be a strategically agile force that can join the United States on major combat operations.

American and British officials said that they did not expect any cutbacks to curtail Britain’s capabilities to fight in Afghanistan over the next five years. But some American military experts question whether the British military will be capable of undertaking future ground operations that are as demanding as those in Afghanistan or to carry out simultaneous operations, including risky humanitarian missions, effectively.

[source]

Frankly, I see this as an excellent opportunity for South Korea to step in and take over some of the role that the British have played. Like the US, South Korea is a country that depends on trade, and it would behoove the ROK government to play a more prominent role in, say, making sure sea lanes from the Arabian Peninsula through the Strait of Malacca and on to the East Sea (aka Sea of Japan), supporting political stability in Afghanistan, providing humanitarian aid in Haiti, etc.

My position has always been that the Pax Americana is now and for the foreseeable future necessary for peace and stability in Northeast Asia, but that does not mean that the ROK-US alliance should flow one way. While the USFK presence on the Peninsula is a near guarantee of South Korea's territorial integrity, one that would be prohibitively cost-prohibitive for South Korea to supply on its own (as it would cost far more than the added cost to the US of stationing USFK in Korea), it frees up the South Korean military to provide support services outside the Peninsula that would go a long way toward playing a more equal role in the partnership.

Of course, we've been here before. South Korea was far and away the US's biggest ally during the Vietnam War (after South Vietnam, I guess), and the sequestered contingent of ROK soldiers in Iraq made it the third largest force outside of the US and the UK. That would certainly suggest South Korea should make sure it carefully picks and chooses which future battles to fight, and it makes the regular patrolling of sea lanes and being a go-to source for humanitarian missions all the more appealing as a military supporting role.

[source]

I dare say that Japan, too, should work with Seoul and Washington to find ways for the three to strengthen their military relationship (preferably while resolving their outstanding territorial disputes). Japan is effectively required to stay under the US security umbrella, and any moves toward expanding its military role might make the neighbors very nervous, but partnered activities with South Korea's military could go a long way toward relieving such anxieties while also providing useful service that Japan itself benefits from. Were Taiwan to do this, though, it could trigger a backlash from China that would cause far more problems than its worth.

Of course, I'm not suggesting that the UK is out of the picture. But it would behoove allies like South Korea to fill whatever vacuum the British military cuts create, to show how much they value the alliance and the stability it brings.

Blair in hot water with corrupt Korean CEO

The Daily Mail is echoing a news story in the Joongang Ilbo that former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair is facing embarrassment over his "secret dealings with a South Korean oil firm" after reports the company's CEO, Choi Kyusun [최규선], served two years in prison for corruption, after being convicted of making illegal payments to influence the awarding of contracts to run a national lottery, and then allegedly got involved in for financial impropriety by supposedly buying his company a place in an oil exploration consortium doing business in Iraq's Kurdistan. Are you getting all that?

This is Korea, where corrupt business dealings are the way we say hello, so it's not that big a deal on this end, but on the other side of the ocean (and then over a continent and then across another ocean), this is putting omuraisu on the XPM's face. From the Korea Herald (because I couldn't find the English-language source in the Joongang):

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair received cash from a Korean oil firm run by a former bribery convict for advice on Iraq's oil-rich Kurdistan, according to news reports.

It had been kept secret for nearly 20 months before it was revealed last week.

Blair, who has been accused of cashing in on his former premiership through a number of consultancy deals, was found to have offered consulting in August 2008 to a consortium of investors led by UI Energy Corporation.

Details on the type of consulting and how much he received for the role have yet to be disclosed.

The Korean firm is headed by Choi Kyu-sun, who was convicted in 2003 in a high-profile corruption scandal involving potential bidders wanting to run a national sports lottery and a son of then-President Kim Dae-jung.

The British government's Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, which vets former ministers' jobs for two years after they leave office, has recently disclosed Blair's advisory role.

According to news reports, Blair repeatedly told the committee that the existence of the deal had to be kept secret at the request of the Korean firm, because of "market sensitivities."

If by sensitivities you mean prison, and by market you mean going to, then spot on! Really, I'd like to think that the former leader of such a powerful nation would have better intelligence about those with whom he does business. But this is the guy who was convinced his buddy Bush had a slam dunk on those WMDs, so maybe I have a better chance of hoping for lollipops coming out my s.o.'s arse when she farts.