"Leadership Both Great and Dear" was the headline over a Newsday column by Murray Kempton in 1986. "Kim Il Sung is president of North Korea. He is never introduced in press releases except as `the Great Leader of Our Party and Our People.' His son is `Kim Jong Il,' who is the Dear Leader." The late columnist helped readers unfamiliar with Asian names by differentiating between them as Great Kim and Dear Kim.
In 1994, Kim Il Sung (Great Kim) died and was succeeded by his son, whom Western writers continued to refer to, tongue-in-cheekily, as Dear Leader. But the son, Kim Jong Il (Dear Kim, in Kempton's simplifying formulation), soon changed his sobriquet to fit his new position.
He stopped having himself called Dear Leader (in Korean, ch'inaehanum chidoja) and assumed his father's informal title, Great Leader (widaehan, "great," yongdoja, "leader"). But that was confusing whenever the two men were spoken of in the same sentence. To which one -- the late Great Kim or the former Dear Kim, now elevated to titular greatness -- did the compound proper noun Great Leader refer?
Solution: Subtly demote the dead Old Man. The deceased Kim Il Sung, formerly widaehan yongdoja, is now remembered in North Korea as widaehan suryong, "major chieftain, big boss," important, but a linguistic cut below Great Leader. It is the son, whose leadership title is no longer encumbered with childlike endearment, who has taken his father's widaehan yongdoja, the top of the communist Korean pecking order.
(The above comes from some highly respectable academic sources who inform me that yongdoja confers greater honor than chidoja. However, after listening to a Foggy Bottom briefing, I am prepared to conduct informal talks with linguists who have other views, so long as they do not call such interlocutions "negotiations" and if they agree beforehand to cough up their plutonium rods.)
Let us, then, drop Dear Leader in mocking Kim Jong Il and instead call him Great Leader, with a disdainful "yeah, sure" muttered under the breath. This is in the same sardonic tradition of our adoption of Der Fuehrer for Hitler and Il Duce for Mussolini, with both titles meaning "the leader."
Now to a typographical challenge. Up to now, I have been writing the name of Dear Kim (old habits die hard) as Kim Jong Il. I don't know about you, but that name at the end looks to me more like a Roman numeral II. Others of my ilk, seeing the name transliterated as Kim Jong Il, assume him to be the son of Kim Jong I, which he is not. (We all now know he is the son of the demoted widaehan suryong, once the high-and-mighty widaehan yongdoja.)
Howzabout a hyphen to further international understanding? I will henceforth write the name of the current president of North Korea as Kim Jong-il, which will cause readers to pronounce his name correctly. Alert copy editors, hidebound to the dictates of confusing style, may change it to Kim Jong Il, while I take in a performance of Shakespeare's "Richard Il."
Chosn people
Why do we call the peninsula Korea? And why are some writers ironically calling its troublesome northern portion "the Land of the Morning Calm"?
In 1653, the Dutch ship Sperwer, "Sparrowhawk," destined for Japan, was shipwrecked off the coast of a peninsula unknown to Westerners and its crew taken prisoner. After 13 years, Hendrick Hamel escaped to Japan and wrote about what Portuguese sailors called the Insula de Core, after their version of the name Koryeo, an early dynasty. "The country," wrote Hamel, "... is called Korea by us and Chosn Kuk by the inhabitants."
Fast-forward three and a half centuries. The CIA World Fact Book reports that "the North Koreans generally use the term `Choson' to refer to their country," while "the South Koreans generally use the term `Han'guk' to refer to their country." (That second syllable guk or kuk, meaning "nation," is sometimes cited as a possible root of the ethnic slur gook, but most such slurs have a variety of speculative etymologies, and dictionaries list this one as "origin unknown.")
Chosn, accent on the Cho, was the name of the dynasty that overthrew the Koryeo dynasty in 1392 and ruled the peninsula until the Japanese takeover in 1905. Chosn, Chosen and Choson are also Romanized as Joseon, which breaks into two English words: jo means "morning," and seon means "calm." In 1886, Percival Lowell of Boston wrote Choson: The Land of the Morning Calm.
This description of a country leading to its name parallels the naming of Japan, or Nippon, from ni-pon, "sun-rise," which we recognize as "the Land of the Rising Sun."
Five years before Lowell's evocation of peaceful mornings, while rooting around in the etymology of Choson, William Elliott Griffis wrote a book titled Corea: The Hermit Kingdom. It turned out that the pejorative hermit nation is more often applied to the isolated northern part of the peninsula with its hungry population and fierce leadership than the gentle, beautiful Land of the Morning Calm.
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