슈슉 슈숙. 슉. 시. 시발럼아.

Origin

This string of syllables was not written by anyone with a message in mind. The source is text used around 2018 in Korean Twitch ‘audio terror’ donations, which exploited a bug in the text-to-speech engine to make it produce grotesque noises. It was written to be read badly by a machine rather than by a person, which is why it is full of stops and broken syllables.

What turned it into a meme came later. It was rediscovered on Twitter around 2020 when, during a second-hand sale conversation, one party hit the predictive-text function by mistake and fired off the string repeatedly. A screenshot of the other person’s baffled reply spread widely — a demonstration of exactly how the text reads when it arrives with no context.

Spread

An image completed it: a dolhareubang — the stone grandfather statues of Jeju Island — holding a knife. The statue is not a photo edit. It stands to the left of the main entrance of Hotel Nanta on Jeju, complete with a chopping board set in front of it.

A figure normally associated with a mild, benevolent expression, posed with a blade, combined with the stuttering onomatopoeia, the profanity in the middle and the relentless full stops, produced something like a person swinging a knife and muttering. Neither the statue nor the text was made with that in mind; putting them together created the scene. At the end of 2021 a news outlet even tracked down and interviewed the sculptor.

Usage

Conveying anger that will not come out in words
Depicting stammering or a sentence breaking off mid-way
Mock-menacing jokes paired with the dolhareubang image

It contains profanity and so needs some care about where it is used, but in practice it reads less as a real threat than as being too exasperated to speak.

Sources

Namuwiki, ‘Syusyuk syusuk. Syuk. Si. Sibalreoma.’ — the origin in 2018 Twitch TTS-bug donations; the 2020 Twitter rediscovery and the mis-sent predictive-text screenshot; the pairing with the knife-wielding dolhareubang and the statue’s real location at Hotel Nanta on Jeju
Nate News, December 25th, 2021 — an interview with the sculptor