# 아기다리 고기다리



## 조금만

In a TV drama, a woman is frying up some sort of meat in a skillet, and grumbling that her friend is late. 아기다리 고기다리고 있는데 she says in an irritated voice.

  I'm sure she isn't a cannibal. But what's this about baby's legs??  Is this some sort of pun resting on the way    아기- 다리  and  고기 - 다리  might be jocularly seen to have the root 기다리  (as in 기다리다)  "hidden" in them?  Hence an expression of impatience about someone not showing up on time, with the fact that the speaker here just happens to be frying meat having nothing to do with it?

 I found a lot of examples by googling Korean blogs, so I can see it's a common expression, but the contexts weren't enough to go on, apart maybe from some examples where people fed up with waiting for the latest IPhone to be released in Korea used this expression to head up their complaints.


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## yohan park

Hi
How are you.
I'm native Korean speaker who is living in Melbourne studying English.

Yeah~she said some thing simillar with what you heard but I reckon she didnt mean 아기다리 고디라디고 있는데 but she meant 아~~~ 기다리고 기다리고 있는데. It can be translated like "I'm quite boring watting for....(it feels like she really mind waitting for someting ). 
As you wrote that, she was grumbling that her friend is late so I reckong she says like that by her alone. 
Exactly that is not the sentence that someone talk to other but it is like monologue.

If it can be translated 아기다리 고기다리 blah blah blah~~
She can be seen as cannibal or something~ lol

and most of koreans who is waitting for iPHONE to be released , they are saying
like "아~~ 아이폰(iphone)나오기를 기다리고 있는데 at the moment.

it can be hard to understand korean for u as much as i got some trouble understanding english ;-)


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## 조금만

Many thanks for your reply, which confirms my hunch about the underlying word-play.

The "baby's legs meaty legs" way of expressing impatience does seem to be in quite common use nowadays. Currently a google on the precise phrase "아기다리 고기다리" finds 6,600 hits, your reply being currently in the #1 spot (!)

Just yesterday, I found an item via a search on Naver (yielding "only" 63 hits, but Naver is much more selective in its coverage than Google), where a writer explains for the benefit of a foreign enquirer that the expression 
아기다리 고기다리 던여행  is a jokey way of saying  아 기다리고 기다리던 여행, which is very close to your alternative transcription of the variant I heard.


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## Anais Ninn

"아기다리 고기다리는-" was a phrase used at school twenty to thirty something years ago to teach the importance of 맞춤법 (punctuation) including 띄워쓰기 (spacing). I have an impression that those examples are no longer used in Korean classes at school, but young people are still familiar with it because the older generation keeps using it. 

Another example used along with 아기다리 고기다리는- was "아버지 가방에 들어가신다." Those expressions should be written as "아, 기다리고 기다리는-" and "아버지가 방에 들어가신다.", respectively.

I hope it helps.

Anais


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