In South Korea, I entered the elevator one day in a high-rise building, and I was looking for the fourth floor button... but I did not find it! The buttons jump from 3 to the letter “F” and then to 5, as if the fourth floor of the building had evaporated. At first glance, I thought that there was a malfunction in the painting, or that the construction worker had forgotten a floor in the rush of work, then I discovered that the secret was linguistic, not electrical or engineering.

In Korean, the number four - derived here from the original Chinese - is pronounced “sa” (사). The irony is that the word “death” is also pronounced “sa”! It is true that the two Chinese characters are written differently (四 for four and 死 for death), but the ear does not differentiate between them at all. Through no fault of his own, the number four became a similitude of death in the ears, and he paid the price for a phonetic resemblance to which he had no help.

From here, what scientists call “quadrophobia” was born. Imagine: many buildings - especially hospitals - delete the fourth floor, or replace it with the letter “F”, short for the English word four, to escape the ominous number. Room number four also often disappears; Who would be willing to sleep or receive treatment in a room whose number, in the ears, is “death”?
The matter does not stop at the walls of hospitals; Gifts are given in groups of three or five, not four, and amounts of money are given at thirty or fifty thousand won, while forty people avoid it. In fact, apartments whose numbers end in four are sold at a slightly lower price than their neighbors. Superstition, it seems, has a price that is paid in cash and its loss is calculated in won. Some parents choose for their children phone numbers that do not contain all four, and some drivers avoid license plates that carry them, as if the number were an infection that they feared could be transmitted.

The funny thing is that Korea is not alone in this; China and Japan share the same obsession with the number four, because the phonetic origin is the same and all tongues have inherited it. But the Koreans, from what I sensed, clung to the trick more than their neighbors until they engraved it in concrete and steel, and made it a base that the eye could see in almost every tower. The most beautiful thing is that the younger generation has begun to smile at her as an inherited habit rather than a firm belief.
I got out of the elevator smiling, thinking that an entire language was able to hide an entire floor of a real, existing building, shift the prices of apartments, and redraw car license plates... for nothing but because one day a small number dared to sound like a word that no one likes.