The Korean marketing and advertising industry is suffering from a serious ailment I'll call anglicitis. This is the inexplicable compulsion to use English or quasi-English words and expressions in situations where they are unnecessary or even misleading. This disease is not just a Korean phenomenon. Epidemiologists haven't been able to figure out where it started, but it has already spread all over the world.

(I can't take credit for coining the term anglicitis, by the way. At first I thought I had made it up myself, but then I discovered it already in use on websites in the Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch languages.)

Here's an example of one of the symptoms of this plague. A neighborhood acquaintance of mine and I were sitting in a local eatery sharing some food and drink while watching a soccer match on the restaurant's big flat-screen TV. During a commercial break, there was an ad for some sort of insurance. As is common in Korea nowadays, the ad contained a sound bite recorded by a male North American voice. He said, "World Best!" Not the correct "The World's Best" mind you, but a direct, word-for-word translation of the Korean segye choego. (Korean has no articles and no need, in this case, for the possessive.)

As part of my ongoing not-very-scientific research into this phenomenon, I asked the guy I was with why they didn't just say the slogan in Korean. His answer was typical of what Koreans say when you ask that question: "But then it wouldn't have that modern, international cachet."

"But shouldn't they at least get the English correct and say 'The World's Best'?" I protested.

"That's too complicated," he said. "It's easier for Koreans to understand without all those extra little grammatical annoyances tacked on."

I wanted to say that, indeed, the whole point of advertising is to communicate your message clearly to the target audience and that the best way to do that in Korea would be to write the ad copy in Korean rather than in screwed-up English, but I'd been around that tree so many times before, I decided to just move on to another topic.

From the accent, I can safely say that the fellow who did the voice-over was a native speaker who would immediately recognize the awkwardness of the line he was given to say. Do you suppose he pointed out the problem to the director, account executive, or copywriter? I'll bet he didn't. After all, who knows where your next voice-over job might come from, and you don't want to become known as somebody who's difficult to work with. (Hmmm. Maybe that's why I never get asked to do stuff like that.)