I Wanted To Share Some Thoughts On ‘온유하게 해요 (shine On You)’. Everybody Is Already Aware

i wanted to share some thoughts on ‘온유하게 해요 (shine on you)’. everybody is already aware of the title pun by now, but there’s another meaning on it that rly impacts me & i want to say.

so as many know, onew (온유) is an actual word in korean. i wouldnt give 온유 an exact translation but it’s along the meaning of softness, tenderness, or mildness. i’ll use ‘tender’ here.

so, onew’s name is in both titles. ‘온유하게 해요’ means ‘to make (smth) tender/onew’ & in ‘shine on you’, ‘on you’ sounds like ‘onew’ too. that’s cute, but what i want to focus on is the verse where this sentence appears:

‘싱그러운 미소가 불안했던 마음을 온유하게 해요’.

my personal trans goes: ‘your refreshing smile makes my (previously) troubled heart tender’. note that ‘-했던’ implies past onto ‘troubled’.

now, what makes this verse so lovely to me is exactly bc 온유 is his name. he is 온유. then saying ‘your smile makes me tender’ ends up meaning ‘your smile makes me who i am’. and more than that: ‘your smile makes my troubled heart tender’ seems to paint that ‘seeing your smile makes me remember who i really am’.

isn’t that such a beautiful love to have? to remember yourself in someone’s smile, to find strength in them to never stop being own tender self through all the troubles that come. it’s incredibly romantic.

and if you think about it, this verse is so precious bc it comes such a long way: if jinki wasn’t named onew all the way back 10 yrs ago, this sentence wouldn’t mean much today. it’s a verse with a simple sound, but its meaning came together in a careful & rare balance.

it’s this sort of thing that adds all the magic in art.