A Crow in the Snow

When you take a non-English speaking background wife, you take on the responsibility of teaching her the fine points of English, or whatever language is spoken wherever you happen to live. My wife has an enquiring mind and has taken it upon herself to study English formally at the nearby College of Technical and Further Education, TAFE for short. She got her semester results yesterday, 11^th July, and she can hold her head high; she did well.

Now, English in the classroom is one thing, but it doesn’t prepare the student for the more casual nuances of the language, as spoken by us natives. My personal policy is to educate my wife in the less formal intricacies of the language as the opportunity presents itself. This pays off in that if there is something that English and Thai have in common, my wife will tell me. Thus I often benefit by having my own knowledge of Thai enriched.

A few days after my wife arrived in Australia for her first ever visit here, I showed her the bamboo that I had planted in my back yard, and there chanced to be a golf ball lying in the grass close to the bamboo. I semi-often find golf balls in my yard, there is a popular golf course across the road. My wife asked me what this golf ball was doing on the grass, and I explained that when a golfer drove the ball, sometimes a large black bird would mistake it for the egg of another bird, and presume that it had chanced upon an easy meal. This black bird would, as often as not, pick up the ball and fly off with it, but when it discovered that this particular egg would not crack, it would fly high and drop it so as to encourage the egg to break and give up its contents.

Alas! These “eggs” do not crack, but they do bounce, and the bird will soon lose interest; thus the golf balls in my yard.

The enquiring minded lady asked me what these black birds were called in English, so I told her: “crow(s)”, and the Thai term, nok-gah, was given to me.

Then all sorts of ways the term “crow” could be used surfaced in my mind. The first was the “crow-call” on Australian TV where the presenter of a panel-show, when told something of little relevance, uttered the expression “faark!” while live to air. His claim that it was just a crow call was ignored by management and he was suspended from his hosting of the show. I decided to leave that one alone for the time being. Then there is the term “old crow”, a derogatory term used to describe a woman who has aged and shows it in both looks and temper. I explained this term to her, including the exact situation where one does not use the term. She took it all in.

She than told me that in Thai, there is an equivalent term, “ee-gah”. It seems that this particular term is really impolite, and even though we were in my yard, with nobody visible for at least a hundred metres or more, she asked me not to say it out loud. From the warnings that she laid upon me, this term must be something that might be whispered by one man into another’s ear without the “ee-gah” being able to hear the insult; That’s how bad it is!

The usual warning, “don’t try this at home” applies to the above.

This next incident didn’t happen to me, but the events and the language usage make perfect sense to me in context, and my wife tells me that about half of the time, when I use the term, I get it marginally wrong – and that’s from someone who knows the trap and tries to not fall in.

There was a guy from the US of A who lived in Thailand with his Thai girl-friend. He had picked up a bit of Thai here and there, and thought that his Thai was passable, but he and his girl-friend spoke English at home because her English was somewhat better than his Thai.

Time came for him to take one of his not-very-often trips back to visit his family, and he decided to take his girl-friend with him. There was one small catch: his family would not approve of their not-married status as his was a religious family and he was the black sheep. A particular problem was that he had to show his mother that there was more to his and Thai lady’s relationship than just sex. One way would be for him and girl-friend to communicate in Thai, and bamboozle the mother. He liked the idea.

One day in the US of A, he asked his girlfriend [in his very best Thai] if she would like to go and see the snow which had happened to fall the previous day in an adjacent state: something like “Khun chorp bai heemah mai?”. She looked at him with an expression of surprise and asked him why she would want to go and see that.

Cutting the long story short, he had drawled the Thai word for “snow”, and one must not do that, otherwise the meaning changes.

What he should have said for “snow” is not easy to write in English, but it is something like “himmuh” with very short vowels. What our subject had asked his girl-friend was “[would] you like go [to see] a dog’s cunt?”.

Talking of “that” word, I got a lesson from a former Pattaya bar-girl about something you should never say in Thai. She told me that one may say:

Dot men [smelly fart]
Kii men [smelly shit]
and while they are not polite, they are allowable in the right mixed company and situation. But one should/must never say:

Hee men [smelly cunt]. Both of the words of this proscribed expression have the rising tone.

In 1998, in the village of my then girl-friend, some of the school-children came to me and asked me who was the president of Kenya, the African country. I saw this as a simple question where they wanted to find out something for their school-work. “Moi” I told them, and they burst out laughing. “Moy” is the Thai word for pubic hair, but not a polite expression.

Now for a few ordinary words which, if used in certain contexts, change meaning.

Everyone with a bit of experience in Thailand knows the word for chicken. It’s “gai”. Can you recall seeing a chicken walking around its pen, slowly lifting its feet high, one at a time, and placing them each in front of the other in turn? But the chicken word takes on a different meaning when applied to a human.

Point to a woman and tell someone “Kao gai” [she’s a chicken], and you are calling the indicated woman a prostitute, a street-walker. Same as an Isaan chicken, the road-runner type chicken.

Where I come from, “hoy” is a card game, but in the Thai language it is the generic term for “shellfish”. The most obvious one is the oyster, hoy nangrom or hoy mook [rhymes with “book”]. Then there’s the cockle, a very popular shellfish, called in Thai “hoy kairng”, literally meaning “hard shellfish”. Steam a handful or two of these miniature clam imitations and an amazing thing happens. They will open their shell as the heat kills them and reveal a pink to red interior which can, and often does, resemble a vagina. And thus, the term “hoy” is sometimes used as a somewhat more polite term for the female reproductive interface than the word “hee”, but not so polite that you can use it in genteel circles.

Finally, a bit of linguistic tom-foolery using some of the above!

Imagine a punter at a place where he can get what he is looking for, and he is armed with some Thai. He wants a girl with no “moi”, so he might ask:

Khun mee hoy moy mai mee dai mai? [do you have a hoy without pubic hair?]

Hoy mee moy [my hoy has pubic hair] – or

Hoy moy mai mee [my hoy has no pubic hair]

It’s almost poetic.

The mind boggles.