Dapjeongneo and Deppenfahrerbeaugung

Dapjeongneo is a Korean word that is used when someone asks a question, whose answer they already know, and all that the listener has to do is to make a smart and studied guess about the expected answer and say it out loud.

You can think of it the next time someone asks you, “Do I look good in this outfit?” or even when someone says, “I am totally self-made, don’t you agree?”

Of course, the listener’s response would totally depend on whether they were trying to appease or provoke. And that response would lead to a whole new story.

Has anyone’s questions ever made you feel dapjeongneo?

The Husband would never guess that his driving is earning him so much notoriety on my blog, first Ahiki and now Deppenfahrerbeaugang.

Driving on Indian roads is a very chaotic experience. If you can drive in India, driving anywhere should be a breeze. Or so they say. 

A complex system of hand gestures and horn tooting often stands in for the traffic rules which ought to be followed but often aren’t.

When they aren’t, the Husband gets into full form, raging and spewing vitriol against drivers who won’t move on fast enough, people who persist in dawdling when they ought to be burning rubber. Meanwhile I, terribly afraid of a confrontation, will try to appease him.

And that is how we often get into situations where the Husband, up against another driver’s non-existent skills will engage in deppenfahrerbeaugung, a German word whose literal translation is moron driver eyeballing. In other words, you turn around and glare at a bad driver you’ve just overtaken.

Indian drivers do that all the time. Glaring at each other, and abusing, and trying to out-shout each other. But the funny thing is that while the Husband goes full throttle with his Deppenfahrerbeaugung behaviour, I try to make up for it by showing the other driver my most sympathetic face, to make up for the anger displayed by the Husband.

It’s all the matter of a moment, and then we race ahead, intent on reaching our destination.

It has only just occurred to me what the whole scene must look like from the other guy’s viewpoint. The man in the driver’s seat, raging and screaming, the woman by his side, looking all serene and understanding, almost conciliatory, in comparison, seeming to suggest to the hapless guy, "This too shall pass."

And before he can even process the two conflicting emotions emanating from the front seat of the same car, we’re out of his life.

I bet he slows down even further to contemplate the mystery, leaving him exposed to other wannabe-F1 racers, out to Deppenfahrerbeaugung him.

Have you ever Deppenfahrerbeaugung anyone? Or been at the receiving end of one?