About a week ago, my dad told me a story about a Korean man who killed his son. The man himself wasn’t seen as a killer; he was a former co-worker of my dad’s. He was apparently very cheerful and respectable, and worked his way up to being a supervisor at the Palatine P&DC, a post office headquarters in northern Illinois.

Then, earlier today, my dad told me that this whole thing could have been a misunderstanding. A friend of the victim who got killed heard the victim’s dad say "It’s all my fault" in Korean. This friend was of Korean descent but was born in America and learned Korean as a second language. He reported the victim’s father as the murderer, not knowing that he had mistakenly analyzed the Korean language due to his lack of understanding of Korean. The literal translation was "It’s all my fault," which could be taken as "It’s all my fault because I’m the one that killed him." What the victim’s father is arguing is that although the direct translation may be so, it actually meant that the father held some responsibility of his son’s death because he was not guarding him sufficiently. More or less, this is being presented as an issue of literal versus implied meaning.

Just something I found interesting.