When Koreans hear the phrase sichenmal-lo, it is easy to picture siche (屍體), the word for a dead body — but these are entirely different characters. The siche here is 時體, "time" (時) plus "body, form" (體): the bearing, customs, and fashions of a particular era. Siche means whatever is in vogue, and so sichenmal is the speech in vogue at the time — in other words, slang or buzzwords. The roots of the word reach all the way back to Joseon. The character siche (時體) already appears in a royal proclamation issued by King Yeongjo in 1757, in which the king grumbled that the moment one person does something, a hundred others copy it, and people call that the siche. It was a warning against the herd mentality of following a trend simply because everyone else does. So when someone today says sichenmal-lo "hot," they are using the very word an eighteenth-century king used, to mean "in the slang of the day."