Seaweed soup (miyeokguk) is, by tradition, a precious restorative a mother eats after giving birth (haesan, 解産) to recover her strength. So how did "eating seaweed soup" come to mean failure and defeat? The most widely told account ties it to the forced disbanding (haesan, 解散) of the Korean Empire's army in 1907. People could not bring themselves to speak plainly of that bitter event — the army scattered by Imperial Japan — so they reached for the identical-sounding word, the other haesan, and veiled it as "they ate seaweed soup." The Korean Language Society's 1957 Great Dictionary even defines miyeokguk meokda as "slang for an organization being dissolved or someone being ousted from a post." On top of this, seaweed is slippery, summoning the image of "sliding" and slipping up — which gave rise to the custom of not cooking seaweed soup for someone facing an exam. A dish of celebration, through a coincidence of sound and the wound of an era, became a symbol of failure.