Cho Kuk, former leader of the Rebuilding Korea Party, and conservative opposition figures clashed over a K-pop group member from Geoje, South Gyeongsang Province, who said "museop-no" (meaning "how scary" in dialect) during a YouTube broadcast. After Cho posted a way to distinguish between the Busan dialect and expressions used on "Ilbe" — Ilgan Best Storage, a far-right online community — the conservative opposition pushed back, calling it "stigmatization."
Cho wrote on Facebook on Friday, "There are people who defend Ilbe's practice of attaching 'no' to the end of sentences to mock President Roh Moo-hyun, claiming that Busan and Yeongnam residents use it that way too." He added, "From my observation, Ilbe mechanically attaches 'no' after standard Korean."
In response, Lee Jun-seok, leader of the Reform Party, said via Facebook, "Someone who in 2019 called for taking up bamboo spears is today trying to test people's ideology based on a single word ending." He said, "A 22-year-old idol from Geoje, South Gyeongsang Province, got branded as Ilbe simply for saying 'museop-no' in his hometown dialect."
Lee added, "The very fact that 'no' became a meme (online viral content) among some younger generations came from combining President Roh Moo-hyun's surname with the Gyeongsang dialect he used all his life." He continued, "But if you pull the language out by the roots while claiming to scold those who created the meme, then the Gyeongsang dialect really becomes something only those people can use. That is the very victory Ilbe most desired."
Yoon Sang-hyun, a lawmaker of the People Power Party, also said on Facebook, "It is impossible not to be astonished at the sight of even dialect used in everyday exclamations and soliloquies being branded as mechanical Ilbe expressions." Directing his words at Cho, Yoon said, "Is this really something a political leader who once led a public party should do?" He added, "I feel deep disillusionment at the behavior of applying an ideology-testing standard to a single word of dialect and dividing the public into factions."
