영어게시판

kiss는 입술에만 하는게 아니죠..
특히 화장한 사람끼리 화장안 망치려서 노력하면서
볼만 살짝 대면서 소리로만 하는 키스 ('sound symbolic' word)에 대한 설명^^
입을 다물었다가 입을 열면서 '화'소리를 내면.... "음~화~"로 소리나겠죠...

You've seen it on television, or in the street, hundreds of times, thousands of times.
Two people come towards each other, they obviously know each other very well,
and they start to kiss each other - but it's not a full frontal kiss. No, what happens,
one person puts the cheek against the other person's cheek and they have what is
often called an 'air' kiss. They make a kissing noise, which shows that they're
coming together, as great intimates, but it's not a real kiss at all. And many people
then give this air kiss a noise, a word, and it's usually 'mwah', 'mwah' - something
like that.

Now, how do you write it? Well nobody knows quite how to write it, but it's really
m-w-a-h. I saw it written in about the mid-nineties for the first time. And, there's
a plural too: "there's lots of mwahs about these days" I remember reading
in somebody's journal at one point. It's an affectation, it's associated
with a social elite - probably everybody does it to a degree or another.

What's unusual is to get the effect coming out as a word. It's a sort of
'sound symbolic' word - mwah - it's a lovely way of expressing the actual noise
that takes place when you do a phoney kiss of this kind. And I've never done it myself
- I'm not a 'mwah' type person - but I think an awful lot of people are. I certainly don't
think I've ever heard it on the radio, and certainly not as a way of saying goodbye to
listeners - but I'll try it out and see what happens, so 'mwah'!!