Polite Thai

Asians are more aware of class than those of us from the Americas, where it is considered "cool" to be from the barrio or the ghetto. Indeed, today Serena Williams was bragging about being from Compton.

Leave it to Indians to impose a caste system on an alphabet, but the Thais were quick to follow: in Thai, we have "high-class", "middle-class", and "low class" consonants. Naturally, the low-class consonants are my favorites.

Also, there are different ways of speaking Thai, according to the status of the person you're speaking to. If you're talking to the king's ex-daughter-in-law-once-removed, you must use a special dialect that almost nobody understands. For simplicity, we call it "polite Thai."

At our school, they empahsize "polite Thai". They hate the common language, the Isaan dialect, which is spoken by the people who put rice on our plates.

Yesterday, in class we spent hours studying polite Thai: in particular, how to extend a polite invitation: to go on a date, to attend a wedding, etc. Fortunately, I was not the only boy in the room--there was one other, a cool Japanese guy, named Yamada. I was too shy to ask out one of the girls, so when it came my turn to speak, I turned to Yamada and asked:

"Khun Yamada-san, . . . come to Soi Cowboy with me??"

Soi Cowboy is a notorious red-light district in Bangkok, full of strip-joints, prostitutes, and go-go bars.

The teacher laughed so hard she had to rest her head on her desk.

That afternoon, I used my newfound skills to ask Poo to go dancing.

She said, "Huh?"

We went through my utterance, syllable by syllable, and finally deduced that I had said something like:

"Dearest Beloved, wouldst thou kindly give me the pleasure of accepting my sincere invitation to an occasion of dancing?"

"She asked me (in Thai): why don't you just say 'let's go dancing sometime!'?"

Uhhhhh. I had no answer. But now I understood why the teacher laughed so hard at my invitation to K. Yamada. I had said something like:

"My Good Sir, wouldst thou kindly give me the pleasure of accepting an invitation to an occasion at Soi Cowboy?"