Thai movie title puns

[Note: I've continued to experiment with pop-up romanization for readers who don't read Thai. However, I've tweaked the system, opting to go for AUA romanization instead of the homebrewed modification of AUA that I had been using. Again, if this isn't your cup of tea, feel free to copy-and-paste the Thai into thai2english.com or thai-language.com, which allow users to select the romanization scheme of their preference.]

Thais love wordplay. From คำผวน (Thai spoonerisms) to อะไรเอ่ย jokes (of the "what's black and white and re(a)d all over" variety), wordplay abounds in Thai. And of all the forms of verbal trickery in Thai, the pun is as alive and well as any other.

Of course, I'm certain much punning whizzes over my head without my realizing it, but I catch enough to know it's common. One place I've been noticing puns lately is in movie titles.

Take the recent four-segment horror film, สี่แพร่ง (literally, "four paths", i.e. a four-way crossroads). Its English title is 4bia, a pun on the word "phobia". This is a pretty lame pun in English, but it works better in Thai. That's because the way Thais are taught English, the word "four" is written โฟร์, and pronounced just like the first syllable of "phobia". The word for phobia in Thai is, well, phobia, and "four" is such basic English that every Thai knows it. So it still counts as a pun by Thais for Thais. And it's a better pun in Thai than in English, at any rate.

Another title that I noticed: The Last Moment, the new film by Yuthlert Sippapak (ยุทธเลิศ สิปปภาค). Its Thai title is รัก/สาม/เศร้า. This is a pun on รักสามเส้า, the standard Thai phrase for "love triangle". RID99 has a quaint definition:

รักสามเส้า น. ความรักที่ชาย ๒ คนรักหญิงคนเดียวกัน หรือหญิง ๒ คนรักชายคนเดียวกัน.
love triangle n. love in which two men love the same woman, or two women love the same man.

Putting aside the fact that their definition denies the existence of love triangles in which one or more members are (gasp!) homosexual, a classic love triangle involves all three having a relationship of some kind with the other two, rather than simple two-guys-after-the-same-woman competition. One would expect the two men to be brothers or mortal enemies or bridge partners. Something like that.

Literally translated, the Thai phrase means "three-legged love". The pun in the film title is in the last word: เส้า "leg, support" is a homophone of เศร้า "sad, sorrowful". The implication is that it's a doomed love triangle. (Are they ever not?) Also note that the word เส้า is not the same word as เสา "column, pole, pillar", although the two words differ only in tone (and I wouldn't be surprised if they were etymologically related).

On an interesting side note, my wife thought that รักสามเศร้า (with the word meaning "sad") was the correct spelling of this phrase, and says she has thought so for as long as she's known the phrase. The word เส้า is rare in Thai, so she had reanalyzed it in a way that made sense to her, by substituting it with a homophone which she knew. This is a good example of folk etymology. I don't know if this misconception is at all widespread, but it's a fascinating possibility to think that this movie title might be a covert pun for some folks, and that it may even reinforce the misconception.

See also: this post from last year about a clever movie title, which involves both verbal and orthographic trickery.