메불메

Origin

‘Me-bul-me’ alters the Korean word ‘ho-bul-ho’ — a matter of taste, literally ‘like or not like’ — by replacing the syllable ‘ho’ with ‘me’. The ‘ho’ stands for the footballer Cristiano Ronaldo, and ‘me’ for Lionel Messi, then regarded as his rival.

It began with a friendly between a K League all-star side and Juventus in Seoul on July 26th, 2019. The match had been promoted on the premise that Ronaldo would play; he never did. That he did not even warm up, sitting in his boots throughout, was what particularly rankled.

Online, the response was to refuse even the syllable of his name: any word containing ‘ho’ got its ‘ho’ swapped for ‘me’. The best-known result is me-bul-me.

Spread

No word was safe. Walnut, walnut cakes, anything at all containing the syllable was rewritten, and the further the word was from football the funnier it got.

It moved fast enough that within a week the press was writing it up as vocabulary produced by the Ronaldo affair. What kept it alive, though, was less the incident than the fact that the word is simply convenient. Many people now use it as a synonym for ‘a matter of taste’ without thinking of Ronaldo at all.

Usage

Of anything that divides opinion
The wordplay of deliberately swapping the syllable
Football-community shorthand for the 2019 incident itself

It is worth knowing that the word was coined to needle a specific person, even though most users now employ it purely as a variant of the ordinary phrase.