[TALKING TRENDS] 'Picketing'

Seo Jeong-min
The author is a senior reporter of the JoongAng Ilbo.

“Mom, just trust me! I’ll get the ticket!”

Every year around this time, Koreans start a picketing war to buy tickets for end-of-year shows featuring their parents' favorite celebrities.

Picketing is a combination of pi, which means blood in Korean, and ticketing. It refers to the bloody hunger games including an enormous number of people competing to get hot tickets for musicals, concerts and sporting events.

As competitions to get tickets are getting fiercer and fiercer, many related words have been newly coined.

Chwicketing is a combined word of chwiso, meaning cancel in Korean, and ticketing. It means people who failed to get a ticket in the first round of the competition try buying cancelled ones in the next round.

The word open run gained a different meaning in Korean, as well. The Korean version of the expression refers to a situation where people start waiting for the ticket windows to open at an early hour and rush in at the very moment they open up.

According to a survey of 2,500 people in their 20s to 40s conducted by Lotte Members on Sept. 8 through 9, 62.2 percent of respondents said they have "joined an open run before.”

Among the different types of open run, picketing to get musical or concert tickets was most popular, accounting for 29.5 percent, followed by competing to get a seat at a must-visit restaurant, at 20.1 percent.

When compared to the latter, the former is less common, as only a limited number of ticket holders are able to enjoy the shows, performed only for a limited period of time.

So, there’s no other option to get a ticket except fighting a bloody battle online.

Another newly-coined turn of phrase is the using the suffix “-getting,” which has a similar pronunciation in Korean to ticketing. It can be used when someone gets something as satisfied as if they've just run the picketing gauntlet.

So if you buy or eat gopchang, or beef or pork intestines, you might say “I succeeded in gopgetting.” If the dish was spaghetti, it’s pagetting.

BY SEO JEONG-MIN [meantree@joongang.co.kr]