Ruminations in Korea

A little over a month ago, I posted an audioblog about my thoughts on Koreans taking two or more english words and combining them to create a new, utterly meaningless word. In the audio post, I specifically mentioned the fascination with the word “Utopia” and how Koreans woud stick the “pia” part of “Utopia” to the end of a word to create a sense of the perfect, utopian version of whatever the root word is.

Tonight, while I was searching for a car rental place online, I discovered a rather unusual website. It appears that the website deals with sports tour packages. Specificially leisure sports. Ordinarily, when talking about leisure sports, Koreans will take the “Le” from “Leisure” and the “ports” from “Sports, and combine them to creat the single word “Leports” to refer to leisure sports.

However, that is not the case with this particular site. The expanded name of the site is “Leisure Sports Utopia”. However, that was apparently too long. So, they took the “Le” from “Leisure, the “S” from “sports”, and the “pia” from “Utopia” and compined them to create the offical name for their site: Lespia

Honestly, if you heard someone say the word “lespia”, would you immediately think “leisure sports utopia?”