A serving of kimchi. Pickled cabbage on a plate.
25 November 2022
Kimchi is a staple of Korean cuisine, a dish of fermented cabbage and other ingredients such as garlic, ginger, fermented fish paste, red pepper, and onions. The word starts appearing in English in the late nineteenth century. From an article with the dateline of 4 May 1888 in the August issue of the Christian missionary magazine The Gospel in All Lands:
There is a peculiar kind of pickle resembling sauer kraut which goes by the name of “kimchi,” and, while it is rather offensive to ordinary olfactories, it is not more so than the famous German dish.
The slang phrase in deep kimchi, a euphemism for in deep shit, arose among US military personnel stationed in South Korea. We don’t know exactly when service members started using the expression, but it was probably in the 1960s or early 1970s. There is no record of it from the Korean War era.
Craig Hiler’s 1979 novel about the Vietnam War, Monkey Mountain, has this line supposedly uttered in 1969:
If something happens before we can get backups flown in, then we’re in deep kimchi.
That may or may not reflect actual use of the phrase in 1969, but the earliest example in print is from the Christian Science Monitor of 26 September 1978 in an article about recently appointed chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff General David Jones:
Others credit General Jones with being “the principal and most vocal” supporter of the AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) radar plane program when it was “in deep kimchi” and with convincing Defense Secretary Harold Brown that it was wrong for the Air Force to kill its last wing of F-15 fighters and replace it with two other wings of F-16 fighters or A-10 ground attack aircraft.
Sources:
“Customs in Korea” (4 May 1888). The Gospel in All Lands, August 1888, 366. Google Books.
Lighter, J.E. Historical Dictionary of American Slang, vol. 2 of 2. New York: Random House, 1997, s.v. kimchi, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2021, s.v. kimchee, n.
Popik, Barry. “Deep Kimchi (deep trouble).” The Big Apple (blog), 14 November 2020.
Webbe, Stephen. “Our Top Military Chief Prefers ‘Readiness Now.’” Christian Science Monitor, 26 September 1978, B–13. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Image credit: Star5112, 2008. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.