감추다 / 가혹하다

감추다 1) hide, conceal, cover up (something)
             2) hide, disguise, conceal, keep secret (emotion, truth)
             3) disappear, vanish

Now I'm not certain about how exactly 이히기리우구추 works, but my basic understanding is that they help turn intransitive verbs into transitive verbs. Take something like 익다 (to ripen, grow) and add 히 to it and you get 익히다 (to cook all the way through, boil). Likewise, 익다's other meaning is to be experienced or skilled, while 익히다 means to become proficient or master something (something you study usually). With this in mind, I feel like 감추다 is the transitive version of 감다. But the last verb I studied was 감다, and the only relatively related meaning could be closing one's eyes, and in that sense 감다 is a transitive verb (눈을 감다). It's hard to make a case that these two are related, but nonetheless, they fit the pattern outlined above so well that I cannot be draw a connection in my mind.

With that out of the way, let's take a look at the three uses of 감추다. The first is to hide, conceal, or cover up something. Sentences pulled from Naver:

보이지 않은 곳에 감추다
Hide (sth) in an unseen place.

서랍 속에 감추다
Hide in a drawer.

뒤에 감추고 있는 것이 뭐예요?
What are you hiding behind your back?

이 화장품은 잡티를 감쪽같이 감추어 준다
This makeup covers blemishes very well (as good as new).

감추다 can naturally be used with objects. This raises the question though - what's the difference between 감추다 and 숨기다? 숨기다 means to hide, conceal, cover up - just as 감추다 does. I'll have to ask a native speaker for nuances between the two, but from what I've seen in various books I've read, 숨기다 is more often used, as is its passive form, 숨겨지다 compared to 감춰지다. Once again, I'll need to ask some questions about the difference between these two. I don't know if I want to bring 가리다 into this analysis... I'm sure the more posts I accumulate, the more intuition I'll gain.

Anyways, on to 감추다's second meaning. To hide, disguise, conceal, or keep secret an emotion or truth.

창피한 사실을 감추다
hide an embarrassing truth (sweep something under the rug)

나는 당신에게 감추는 것이 없다.
I'm not hiding anything from you.

나는 분노를 감출 수 없었다.
I couldn't hide my anger.

그가 뭔가를 감추고 있다는 느낌을 받았다.
I felt that he was hiding something / I got the feeling that he was holding something back.

정부는 스캔들의 전모를 감추려고 애쓰고 있다.
The government was trying hard to cover up the full extent of the scandal.

감추지 않고 솔직하게 털어놔 봐.
Don't hide it and tell me what's going on. / Stop holding back and get it off your chest.

So truths, emotions, etc. Pretty straightforward. The third one is where it gets a bit tricky.

자취를 감추다
vanish without a trace

범인들은 감쪽같이 자취를 감췄다
The criminals have covered their tracks / vanished into thin air.

삐삐가 자취를 감추고 휴대전화가 그 자리를 대신했다
Beepers have disappeared now and mobile phones have replaced them.

The last sentence is interesting. I'm sure no Korean would have a problem understanding what the intended meaning of the sentence is, but still... The subject of the first part of the sentence is 삐삐 (beeper). It's as if saying that beepers disappeared on their own. They hid their tracks. 자취 means trace or tracks. From further investigation on the web, I think this is a popular saying. Despite its literal meaning (to me anyway) being "so-and-so hid their trace", the understood meaning is that the subject pretty much disappeared. I'll have to use this down the road...

A quick word on 감쪽같이... this is a new phrase for me. I can't seem to find a definition for 감쪽, but 감쪽같다 means to be as-good-as-new, or just like new, unnoticeable (in the fact that something is not new), etc. It seems that this word can be used with 고치다, as well as 도망치다 and 사라지다. So something can be repair or mended to be as good as new, and somebody can disappear or escape unnoticed. Interesting. I will definitely have to use this word in the future.

On to 가혹하다.

가혹하다 1) severe, hard, harsh, cruel, merciless, brutal

I've seen this word quite a bit. But I seem to always mistake it for 유혹 (meaning temptation). I used to live next to a bar named 유혹 (and became good friends with the waitress at that bar) and for some reason this word has stuck way more than any other X혹 word. Anyways, 가혹하다 means severe or harsh. A couple sentences from Naver:

가혹한 현실
harsh reality

가혹하게 다루다
be hard on somebody

용의자는 경찰 수사 과정에서 가혹한 행위를 당했다고 주장했다.
The suspect insisted that he was treated harshly during the police investigation.

It seems that 가혹하다 can be used with 다루다 to simply mean to treat someone bad. It's always good to know how adjectives pair up with verbs, or adjectives with nouns, etc. These word pairings are usually the accepted standard and convey the clearest image to a Korean in their mind. The problem I've seen with a lot of foreigners when they they speak Korean is that they translate commonly accepted word pairings in English. To the foreigner, this makes perfect sense. To the Korean, it's rather confusing. I've seen some really good Korean writing from an English-native speaker, and I was curious what Koreans thought of it. I showed it to my friend and she had a hard time understanding some of what he was saying. He said things like 그 책은 내 세상이 발칵 뒤집혔다 (that book changed my world, or literally "completely flipped over my world"), etc. There were actually parts in his writing that my Korean friend couldn't quite understand (she's a well educated Korean law student, so this was not due to any lack of ability on her part), and yet I could. It was as if I was reading English writing... in Korean. It was very bizarre.

Anyways, the whole point of this anecdote is to stress the importance of knowing which words are commonly paired with other words. I suppose it's the same in English. Koreans make vocabulary mistakes all the time in English, using words in contexts that English-speakers could never have imagined.

A quick search on Google brought the most common word pairing for 가혹 which seems to be 가혹행위. Cruel/harsh treatment. So someone can 다루다 someone else 가혹하게, and someone can be the receiver of 가혹행위. I'm sure the more I see this word, the more word pairs I'll come across.

That's it for today.