Big Milks!

It took me months to catch onto one of my favorite Thai to English mistranslations. I never heard if often myself, but some female teachers were wondering why students would snicker and say “big milk, big milk!” before exploding in incontrollable laughter. As the translation goes, the Thai word for milk “nom” is also the Thai word for breasts (and for those who really care their word for nipple “hua-nom” literally translates to “milk heads”.) So with a quick peek in the dictionary Thai students translate “nom yai” or what means “big breasts” into “big milks.” It’s a point of endlessly laughter for Thai students.

I was teaching descriptions of people to my students and had them write paragraphs about the people in photos I passed out to them. As expected many paragraphs contained the sentence, “She has really big milks.” In my infinite maturity of now being 25 years old, I brought this up in all my classes and, for better or worse, explained the whole misunderstanding. Part of me expected to hear the words “boobs” and “breasts” incessantly for the next couple days, but to my surprise explaining the correct words to them has completely taken all of the fun out of the joke. Though the students initially found the word boob to be funny, somehow having Ajarn Dustin teach it to them disarmed the word of any humor at all. Evidently, now I’m the only one who thinks “big milks” funny.