Jung-kkok-geu-ma

Origin

"Junggeok-geuma" is short for "what matters is the will to just keep going even after you break," a twist on the earlier Korean catchphrase "junggeokma" ("what matters is a will that does not break"). The original came out of esports. On November 6, 2022, at the League of Legends World Championship final in San Francisco's Chase Center, DRX beat T1 3–2 — a team that had scraped into Worlds as the sixth seed of the LCK summer split. A line from the post-victory interview, "the most important thing is a will that does not break," was pulled into headlines and became a catchphrase (Inven coverage).

Timing amplified it. Two weeks later the 2022 Qatar World Cup began, and the phrase was written on Korean flags as a supporters' slogan, carrying it well beyond esports. Many existing write-ups credit the World Cup as the origin, but the order runs the other way: Worlds first, the World Cup as the amplification phase.

Spread

The variant "junggeok-geuma" reached a mass audience at the 44th Blue Dragon Film Awards, held at KBS Hall in Yeouido on November 24, 2023. Actor Jeon Yeo-been used the phrase in her acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actress for the film "Cobweb" (Pickcon, November 24, 2023). She said she had repeated it often across nearly a hundred stage greetings around the film's release, and the press covered the win under the phrase itself.

The variant resonated more widely than the original because of how realistic its posture is. "Junggeokma" demands the ideal state of not breaking; "junggeok-geuma" admits you have already broken and says you carry on anyway. Since far more people are broken-but-still-showing-up than unbroken, the second version got more use.