For those of you who don't know, 다리 (da-ri) means "legs" in Korean. And in everyday Korean speech, you get the concepts of 무다리 (mu da-ri or "radish legs") for a person with wide legs (especially calves), "long dari" for people with the desired long and apparently "western" style of legs, and also "short dari", which points to the opposite, undesired situation of having short, Korean-style legs. Korean women are known for their leg-lengthening tricks, such as wearing high heels all the time, wearing extra high heels below their jeans that have their bottoms sweeping on the floor, the (thankfully dead) platform shoe fad, wearing jeans as low as possible, etc. It's been explained to me that Korean women have extra-long torsos and shorter legs. Well, I could buy that, from my own observations.

But there's another kind of legs worth making note of; these are the "dongnae dari" (동네 다리), which is a term I coin here literally meaning "neighborhood legs". The more nuanced meaning would be something like "neighborhood" or "around-the-way girl legs", but I leave that to you to chew on. All I have to say is that I got a place in my heart for all kinds of girls and legs and whatnot. You see the coiffed and sexy and smooth Kangnam girls walking around looking like a million bucks, but then you see the neighborhood girl walking into the local Red Mango strutting her stuff and flipping her hair and throwing attitude like she thinks she is in Kangnam and not a little round-the-corner joint. She thought she was fly; I had to agree, although she was fly in a fish-n-grits, sweaty, jukejoint kinda way. If such analogies can be made…

Please excuse the varicose veins. Did I mention fish-n-grits? Hehe.

Don't flame me for this one. Just goooo with the flow and indulge the few of us out there who have a grittier set of tastes…