aespa's Saddle Up Performance

What happened

aespa's official channel posted a video titled "come saddle up", tagged with member Winter and #SaddleUp. Its auto-captions pick up lyric lines such as "If you walk it like you talk it, baby, please stand up". Auto-captions are rough, so the wording may not be exact.

In the Korean comments

The most-liked of these comments is about clothes. In translation, it reads: "I said I've been waiting for the casual-clothes Saddle Up." The clothes talk continues. One comment says, in translation, "Wow, leopard print really suits Minjeong, seriously. Let's do a stage in this, please." Another is only "호피..." (hopi, leopard print). Minjeong is Winter's given name, Kim Minjeong, and the first of these two comments writes it with the affectionate ending 민정이 (Minjeong-i, Minjeong with a familiar suffix). Other comments get specific about the dancing. One points to 0:13, the "you're grown" line, and describes one shoulder pulled slightly back while the hands move. In translation, the commenter calls it insanely cool and tells Kim Minjeong: "You really should keep doing cool dances, because you know what cool is. Live drunk on cool for the rest of your life." Another comment says, in translation, "I love that isolation so much." It uses the dance term 아이솔레이션 (aisolleisyeon, isolation, moving one body part on its own).

What the words mean

사복 (sabok, private clothes) literally means the clothes a person wears as themselves. In Korean it means everyday clothes as opposed to a stage costume or uniform, and it is a plain, neutral word. The most-liked comment puts it directly in front of the song name, so the commenter is talking about a version of Saddle Up in everyday clothes. 호피 (hopi, tiger skin) literally means the hide of a tiger. In talk about clothes it commonly stands for leopard-style animal print, so a comment praising how someone looks in it is talking about a print. 개멋있다 (gaemeositda, insanely cool) is built from 개 (gae, dog) and 멋있다 (meositda, to be cool or stylish). Here 개 (gae, slang intensifier meaning insanely) is not about dogs. As a prefix it is slang for "insanely". The same commenter opens with ㅈㄴ (jonna, a crude intensifier), a consonant-only shorthand roughly like "damn". Both are casual, exaggerated fan praise. In the closing wish, 멋 (meot, style, coolness) is the quality being praised. 취해 (chwihae, drunk) is literally about drinking, but here it is figurative for being absorbed in something. The wish is an affectionate exaggeration for "keep living in your coolness".