NOW that's the way to do it – not so much Gangnam style, as Pyongyang-nam style.
"Hey, sexy lea-der!"
The war of words between the rulers of North and South Korea, following the North's nuclear tests, is an entertaining sideshow that keeps on giving as each side tries to outdo the other. You can see them standing on the border, waving their fists at each other as they lock adjectives in a kind of rhetorical arms race. Yet the more they pile on the threats, the more childish they sound.
North Korea's Kim Jong-un urged his soldiers "to keep themselves fully ready to go into action to annihilate the enemy any time an order is issued" and he instructed them "to deal deadly blows at the enemies and blow up their positions".
One imagines him continuing: "And, and" – here he starts jigging about because he didn't go to the toilet before he left this morning – "And we're going to come to the South and biff you one, and what's more, we're going to cause a really big explosion with our nuclear bomb that will go BANG! so you'd better watch out!"
Pah! The South is having none of this. A spokesman spat (wasn't that a children's TV series?): "If North Korea attacks South Korea with a nuclear weapon, Kim Jong-un's regime will perish from the earth."
Jong-un panics when he hears this. "What is this 'perish from the earth'?" he screams. "I want something like this too! Quickly!" And behind the scenes the People's Lexicographers go to work, all 10,000 of them in a giant stadium, riffling the pages of the OED in unison (as opposed to in Unison, which is another story entirely).
After a few minutes, one Party worker runs forward. "Great leader! I have it! You must say that you will turn Seoul and Washington into a 'sea of fire'. Jong-un pauses. "You fool! The sea takes flames away. Did they teach you nothing at school?"
"Great Leader, we had no books. What I mean is, our bombs are so fierce they set the sea alight. It's a figure of speech -" "Send him to the People's Work Camp."
"- It's a kind of metaphor. When Shakespeare talked about the 'dogs of war', he didn't mean real -"
But his voice is lost as he is bundled into the back of an army truck. Jong-un smiles. "Now, about those long-range adverbs -"
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