Ttideu Burger

Origin

“Ttideu burger” is a line from the MBC sitcom High Kick Through the Roof. The show ran from 7 September 2009 to 19 March 2010, airing weeknights at 7:45 p.m. across 126 episodes, and was the second entry in the High Kick series. In it, Jeong-eum (played by Hwang Jung-eum) is an English literature student at Seoun University and a lodger in Lee Soon-jae’s house; she takes a tutoring job to pay off damage she caused to a pair of shoes and ends up as the English tutor of Jun-hyuk (Yoon Shi-yoon), a high schooler.

The line comes from episode 44, broadcast in November 2009. Jun-hyuk asks Jeong-eum to pose as his girlfriend to shake off an unwanted admirer, and Jeong-eum — five years his senior — shows up at a fast food restaurant in a school uniform, laying on baby talk. In a deliberately lisping voice she says, “Oppa, I wanna eat a ttideu burger. Aang, my ttideu burger. Two slices of ttideu for me.” “Ttideu” is a childish slurring of “cheese,” so a ttideu burger is simply a cheeseburger.

What kept the scene alive was not the line itself but where it landed. Jeong-eum is otherwise the older tutor straining not to be dismissed by her teenage student, so putting that character in a school uniform and the opposite register created a sharp drop. Hwang Jung-eum played the gap straight rather than winking at it, and from the night it aired the scene became a reference point for aegyo — the Korean performance of cute, coaxing charm.

Spread

The line outlasted its broadcast by more than a decade. On 1 October 2015, on MBC’s Radio Star, Seulgi of Red Velvet reproduced the scene verbatim — “Oppa, I wanna eat a ttideu burger. Aang, my ttideu burger. Two slices of ttideu for me” — then broke character in embarrassment and added, “I’m sorry. I really can’t do this.”

On 31 January 2019, the live quiz app JamLive ran “Woong~ Jeong-eum, buy a ttideu burger” as its hint of the day, and several outlets published articles pointing to Hwang Jung-eum, cheeseburgers and High Kick Through the Roof as the associated keywords. That a quiz could use it as a hint says something: the word alone, with no explanation, was enough for a mass audience to identify the source. By then “ttideu burger” had detached from one scene and come to stand for the baby-talk register as such.

How it is used

“Ttideu burger” is used less as a direct quotation than as a name for the act of aegyo itself. No cheeseburger needs to appear in the context, and people who have never seen the original scene still read it correctly as “baby-talk register.” The tone sits between compliment and mockery: whether it grants that someone’s aegyo is cute or points out that it is unbearable depends entirely on delivery.

To describe someone laying on charm to get something. No actual cheeseburger required.
As the standard example of the lisping speech style that collapses Korean ch- sounds into tt-.
As a joke while ordering fast food: “two slices of ttideu, please.”
As a cringe reaction to over-the-top aegyo: “I half expected a ttideu burger.”