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Published on September 3, 2007

It came out of Meesuk's mouth as "Wan Sathorn Jeen", so viewers were wondering what Sathorn Road had to do with it. Co-host Ornpreeya Hunsard quickly corrected her - "Wan Saad Jeen, kha!" - and they finished up the report.

No big deal, right?

Cue the Internet, which has room for all of the opinions of every single person in the universe. Most of these opinions appear on Pantip.com, and sure enough its Chalermchai entertainment webboard was soon alight with commentary. Mispronunciation turns out to be a crime punishable by cyber-hanging.

Apparently Meesuk has done this before, and the Pantip pundits, uploading video clips of her newscasts like they were the latest Britney Spears head-shearing, were tallying the score.

The furore was picked up by one of those old-fashioned paper newspapers, where they cling to quaint traditions like asking the accused for their side of the story. Meesuk duly offered a response: It said "Sathorn" in the script, she claimed.

Well, this "I was only following orders" defence never seems to work, does it? The Pantip fire glowed hotter: Almost every Thai knows about the Wan Saad Jeen festival and would never fumble the name, the critics cried. "She should apologise instead of blaming others," one insisted.

So Meesuk ended up with a new nickname, "Kai Sathorn Jeen", and if you turned up your computer speakers loud enough you could hear the laughter all the way to Beijing. Another chicken hawk launched an online poll where Pantip visitors could vote on whether Meesuk should resign.

Soopsip never makes mistakes, of course, which makes it very difficult coming up with those humble "Corrections" we occasionally publish to pretend we're only human, but for some reason our co-workers have often threatened to vote us out of the office. It's so embarrassing.