@samuelszuchan: In Korea, elementary school kids have a full vocabulary for calling each other poor, and almost every word is tied to housing. In 2016, a fourth grader in Suwon told a classmate he lived in a Humansia apartment, and the other kids answered, so you're a 휴거, a Humansia beggar, and stopped playing with him. Humansia was the brand the state-owned Korea Land and Housing Corporation printed on its subsidized rental buildings. 휴거 welds that brand to 거지, the Korean word for beggar. The boy's mother moved the family out of the new apartment five months after moving in. By 2019 the vocabulary had a full grammar. Owning your apartment sat at the top and needed no slur. Kids whose families rented through jeonse, a lease where you put down a deposit often worth more than half the home's value instead of paying monthly rent, were 전거지, jeonse beggars. Monthly rent made you a 월거지. Public housing made you 엘사, the kid who lives in LH, and low-rise multifamily buildings made you 빌거, the villa beggar. Even income had its own suffix. 이백충 and 삼백충, the 2 million won bug and the 3 million won bug (about $1,400 and $2,000 a month), marked families earning that much, with the insect character doing the demotion. A man serving his mandatory national service as a helper at a Mapo elementary school wrote that the kids there called each other by income bracket instead of by name. None of these words came out of nowhere. The state printed the names, set the prices, and put them on the side of the buildings, where any 9-year-old can read them from the parking lot. The adults all know what those labels mean; they just don't say it. The kids say it.

Sam Szuchan

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Tuesday 18 August 2026 14:00:00 GMT