“The innovation that Johannes Gutenberg is said to have created was small metal
pieces with raised backwards letters, arranged in a frame, coated with ink, and
pressed to a piece of paper, which allowed books to be printed more quickly.
But Choe Yun-ui did that—and he did it 150 years before Gutenberg was even
born.”
“The cult of untranslatables goes beyond orientalism. They spread, meme-like,
with the same misleading explanations repeated. Often, they hew suspiciously
closely to stereotypes about the culture in question.”