Some homegrown businesses and neighborhood restaurants flourish in Burma, thanks for the power of viral posts and social media. But fake news of levitating monks and strange omens also spread online, like wildfire. While not exactly fake news, inaccurate news and old news also tend to resurface from time to time, stirring up racial tension or raising false hopes. In this episode of Learn Burmese from Natural Talk, my cohost Mol Mol from BLAY (Burmese Language Academy of Yangon) and I discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of social media. (Photo by Lanlao, licensed from Shutterstock. Music courtesy of Pixabay)

Vocabulary

ကောင်းကျိုး benefits
ဆိုးကျိုး negative impact
မီးပုံးပျံ aerial balloon
ရင်တထိတ်ထိတ် anxiously (adverb, literally, with the heart beating fast)
လူမှုရေးကွန်ရက် social network
လူမှုရေး social
ကွန်ရက် / ပိုက်ကွန် network
သတင်းမှား fake news
ကောလာဟလ rumors
ပွဲဆူအောင် to stir up things
ပဋိပက္ခ riot, conflict
ဆဲလဖီ ဆွဲတယ် to take selfie
ဆဲလဖီ တင်တယ် to post selfie
ဆဲလီ celebrity
ဝေခွဲလို့မရဘူး cannot determine
ဈာန်ကြွတယ် to levitate, to float by spiritual means
Google ခေါက်တယ် to search in Google
Google လိုက် go ahead and use Google
နှလုံးရောဂါ heart disease
သုံးသပ်တယ် to analyze
ချဉ်းကပ်တယ် to approach
စကားချိုသွေးတယ် to sweet-talk
ဂျင်းမိတယ် to be deceived, to be taken advantage of (slang)
ဂျင်းထည့်တယ် to deceive, to take advantage of (slang)
ပေါက်သွားတယ် to become popular, to go viral online (slang)
ကျမ်းကိုးကျမ်းကား cited sources
ငွေသား cash, money
ပိတ်ပင်တားဆီး to forbid

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Given a choice, would you rather drink the Kool-Aid, or the bitter rainwater (မိုးခါးရေ)? The phrase “to drink the Kool-Aid,” meaning to embrace an irrational, foolish, or dangerous popular ideology, is associated with the tragic episode involving the American cult leader Jim Jones. The Burmese equivelent is "to drink the bitter rainwater" (မိုးခါးရေသောက်တယ်), stemming from the folktale about a kingdrom where everyone, save but a few wise citizens, drank the toxic rainwater and became insane.

The Burmese moviemaker Ko Pauk, who left the country after the military coup of 2021 and joined the resistance, made a documentary honoring the activists in the civil disobedience movement. Though it was released under the English title "The Road Not Taken," the original Burmese title was မသောက်မိသောမိုးခါးရေ ("The Bitter Rainwater I Refused to Drink"). The songwriter and singer ဆောင်းဦးလှိုင် (Hsaung Oo Hlaing) recently released a song titled မိုးခါးရေ ("Bitter Rainwater").

To learn more about the folktale behind the phrase and how to use the expression to talk about taking a stand or caving to pressure, listen to this episode of Bite-Size Burmese. (Illustration by Burmese artist Nyan Kyal Say, NK Artbox; Intro and end music: "When my ukulele plays" by Soundroll, Upbeat.io.)

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Why are the robes woven on full-moon night of တန်ဆောင်မုန်း , the 8th month in the Burmese lunar calendar, called, မသိုးသင်္ကန်း , literally, unspoiled robes? What is the legend of the origin of the practice called ပံ့သကူ to leave out items that others can take away? And what kind of mischiefs or troubles are you allowed to cause on the night called ကျီးမနိုးပွဲ , the carnival of the sleeping crows, or သူခိုးကြီးည , the night of the thieves? These phrases are associated with တန်ဆောင်တိုင် Tazaungdaing Festival, which marks the end of the rainy season, and ကထိန် Kathina, which marks the end of Lent in many Buddhist countries in Southeast Asia. In this episode, my guest Su, a Burmese teacher in Chiang Mai, and I discuss the history, legends, and stories behind these phrases. (Photo: a girl lighting candles in a temple in Bagan, by f11photo, licensed from Shutterstock; music clips from Uppbeat.io)

Vocabulary

ဝရုန်းသုန်းကား in a messy, chaotic fashion (adverb)
တန်ဆောင်တိုင် Tazaungdaing festival, marks the end of rain
ကထိန် Kathina festival, marks the end of Buddhist Lent
ပဒေသာပင် a frame for attaching donated objects
သင်္ကန်း a monk’s robe
စုပေါင်းမဟာဘုံကထိန် communal donation
မသိုးသင်္ကန်း robes woven in a single day
သင်္ကန်းရက်တယ် to weave robe
သင်္ကန်းကပ်တယ် to offer robe
ပုဂ္ဂိုလ် person (respectful usage)
ကျီးမနိုးပွဲ carnival of the sleeping crows (night for harmless mischief)
သူခိုးကြီးည night of thieves (night of mischief)
အအိပ်ဆတ်တယ် to be easily awakened
ထိုးကွင်းထိုးတယ် to get tattooed
ဆေးအောင်တယ် the tattoo proves magical
ထိပ်တုံးခတ်တယ် to lock up in a pillory
ဆေးမင်ကြောင် tattoo
အင်းကွက် magical diagrams
တုတ်ပြီး ဓားပြီး staff-proof, sword-proof
ပံ့သကူပစ်တယ် / ပံ့သကူစွန့်တယ် to cast away something as a donation
ပံ့သကူကောက်တယ် to pick up cast away items
ဖန်ရည် liquid from boiled tree barks
ဖန်ရည်ဆိုးတယ် to dye with liquid from boiled tree barks
အပေါက်ဆိုးတယ် to be bad-tempered
လူကုံထံ the wealthy, the rich
သင်္ကန်းရုံတယ် to drape a robe
ဒလိန့်ခေါက်ကွေး (to fall) in a roll
နိဗ္ဗာန်ဈေး a general giveaway by raffle (figuratively called Nirvana market)
စတုဒိသာ a feast, an event that serves meals to the general public
အယုတ်အလတ်အမြတ်မရွေး regardless of class or virtue
မီးခိုးတိတ် smokeless (unnecessary to cook)
ထမင်းရည် juice left from cooking rice in a pot
ထမင်းရည်ချောင်းစီး rice juice flows like a river
အဟာရ nutritious
ထန်းလျက် jaggery

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