** No spoilers, no worries!
The drama Squid Game has been the most successful series on Netflix. As a Korean who sometimes watches K-dramas, I was easily exposed to the trailer of the show and had been looking forward to watching it as soon as it was released. I consumed the whole episode on my single weekend day after it was revealed to audiences.
Like most people, my favorite episode is 6, Gganbu. To be honest, I hadn’t been heard about the term, gganbu until the old guy kindly explained it to the main actor. I was born in the late 80s in South Korea and am only familiar with half of the games such as ddakji, green light red light, and sugar candy game, which I played a lot in childhood.
As the old man stated, gganbu is a buddy who shares their assets or anything to win the games with the other mates as a team. Alright, but where did this term come from?? I started digging the web to find the origin of the word and noticed that everyone has different opinions on this topic. While there’s no definite answer to this, I want to bring some valid ideas of how it originally came from.
The first candidate is “Jazz Combo” which is a small jazz band. Back in the 1950s, Korean wars broke out, and the U.S. deployed the army to Korea to support South Korea in the war. Eighth United States Army started to be stationed, and the military band was a part of it. There could be occasional performances by the band exposed to people in the town, and it’s possible they watched the plays performed by jazz ensembles also called jazz combo. Currently, some regions have a variation of gganbu that is a ggambo, ggambu or cambo.
The second strong opinion is the Chinese word, Kwan Po Ji Gyo (管鮑之交) which stands for extremely close friendship. This four characters idiom is so famous that everyone knows if they finished their mandatory formal education. So, the theory is the first two characters somehow changed to gganbu and are broadly used by kids.
For me, I think the former idea is more reliable as there are a lot of modern Korean words that are root in a foreign language like English. And the different versions of the word such as cambo back up the assumption that combo is the true origin. Regardless of all these facts, I’m happy that I can use this term whenever I want to insist on a close relationship to my friends. Would you be my gganbu?
