Mok's tire easly and should be walked!

While my Thai is thousands percent better than my Malay the entomology of this word is bizarrely well documented. The word comes from a well known event in remote Malay villages where someone wakes up in a dissociative state and goes on a murderous rampage causing villagers to assume that he was "spirit possessed".

The reason that the entomology of this word is so well known is that they actually developed a tool to stop the person who "ran amok". It is a long wooden pole with a curved semi circle at the end which would allow the villagers to pin the crazy person by the neck against a tree. If you go to the museum in Kuala Lumpur they have an impressive collection of these Amok poles that goes back centuries. I was astonished that the practice was so widely observed that they would actually develop a tool for it.

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