{"id":1473,"date":"2007-08-20T01:35:41","date_gmt":"2007-08-19T17:35:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.quezon.ph\/?p=1473"},"modified":"2015-12-26T04:00:05","modified_gmt":"2015-12-25T20:00:05","slug":"mala-malu-nuestra-senora-de-la-matapobre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.quezon.ph\/2007\/08\/20\/mala-malu-nuestra-senora-de-la-matapobre\/","title":{"rendered":"Mala Malu, Nuestra Senora de la Matapobre"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I disagree with Tingog.com<\/a> and his otherwise worthy anti-Malu campaign, on one, single, point of principle: I’m not for firing people on the basis of what they write. So boycott as you please, but I don’t support having anyone fired. Why not take her travel photos and run a Mala Malu photo caption contest instead? Loads of fun and extremely educational.<\/p>\n

Here, you can play with these charming photos and add your own captions:<\/p>\n

\"Malamalu1\"<\/p>\n

\"Malamalu2\"
\n\"Malamalu3\"<\/p>\n

This all reminds me of something I noted on November 4, 2006, concerning the daughter of a Singaporean MP who snapped, “please get out of my elite uncaring face”<\/a> in response to the angst of another Singaporean. Revisit muddynights<\/a> and then see the odd joker<\/a> and The Intelligent Singaporean<\/a>, and then top off your visit to Tomorrow<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Spanish have a maxim for everything, but for cultivated Filipinos of an older generation, one of their all-time favorites (my father used to quote it to me whenever he thought I was being rude) was:<\/p>\n

Lo cortes no quita lo valiente.
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It means: One’s valor is never diminished by one’s courtesy. But of Mala Malu and her que asco<\/em> columns, I think I’ve found a word our elders would have thought fitted her to a “t”: a more cursi<\/em> set of opinions would be hard to find.<\/p>\n

Thanks to this great find<\/a>, you don’t have to guess what our elders meant by using that word –cursi<\/em>– to describe the Mala Malus of their generation:<\/p>\n

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In his book Cassell’s Colloquial Spanish, A. Bryson Gerrard explains his British take on the word:<\/p>\n

“A colloquial but widely used adjective meaning something like ‘socially pretentious’; it describes people who give themselves the airs of a higher social class, non-U pretending to be U. When applied to things, e.g. furniture of clothes, it contains the idea of noveau-riche. High-class houses in the best Spanish tradition are furnished with an aristocratic simplicity and restraint, and the gaudy, ornate Empire-style furniture which you sometimes find in city apartments would be described as cursi. I once heard a Spaniard say of a friend’s tie iQu\u00e9 corbata m\u00e1s cursi! He was being facetious but i wondered what an Anglo-Saxon might have said … ‘What a fancy tie!’ … ‘What a pansy tie!’ … perhaps ‘What a ghastly tie! since it was not a compliment. Affectation, pretentiousness, excessive ornamentation are all involved.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Technorati Tags: Blogging<\/a><\/p>\n

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