My girlfriend keeps telling me that her brain is on ‘the bright side’. Her English is, ahem, fine, but like many Thai girls in inter-national couples she keeps pushing with it. Compared to her English skills when I first met her on a street in Nakhon Ratchasima this is major breakthrough.
And since ‘bright’ and ‘right’ are so close phonetically and also share essentially similar meaning (at least if you are talking about the brain), it all adds up to a more headache for my girlfriend’s brain (if you follow me). But if it were not enough, there is no ‘r’ sound proper in the Thai language, so to pronounce it is really a challenge for the locals. Many farangs would swear you they hear regularly Thais saying ‘you layh layh’ when serving you meals which means ‘Do you like some rice’?
Still I assumed, until very recently, that she meant either right side or a bright side as to have one’s brain positioned on ‘the light side’ does not make a lot of sense on my side of the universe.
But no. No.
Today I realized that what she has been saying over so long time was ‘My brain is on the bride side’. This is a replica of the Thai phrase that girls from Isaan region (which is a birthplace of my girlfriend, Ubon-Ratchathani being the native city) would normally say to their procrastinating boyfriends when they lose their tempers. It actually means ‘I want to marry you’, or, to put it closer to its original meaning, ‘I am seeing myself as your bride (and yes, I am telling this as you seem to have not noticed this yourself you old asshole since you have not yet proposed to me)’.