Sodomy beats sodUMNy

Yesterday I posted Politics of mud or maturity?, showcasing how political differences or disagreement between friends needn’t affect their friendship nor end up in fisticuffs or puerile emo-words like “you hate Anwar” yadda yadda.

My matey, Dean Jones* Johns, columnist for Malaysiakini, in his Land of the rotten, home of the gullible had expressed his belief, contrary to mine, that Anwar Ibrahim, warts and all, is still the best bet for Malaysiakini.

* apologies to Dean and thanks to Crankshaft for noticing my 'deliberate' mistake wakakaka

I rate Dean as one of the hardest-hitting columnists in Malaysiakini, but the best part of his writing has been his tongue-in-cheek humour, jolly good play on the English words and puns, the last of which make me suspect he was a Chinese in his previous incarnation, and no doubt of the Cantonese variety too ;-)

Cantonese are renowned or notorious for their love for and use of puns, especially saucy and sexy ones. In fact a sweetie once told me that one could hardly swear in Mandarin, where t'a ma ter & wang pa tan would exhaust the northern Chinese's entire repertoire of obscenities ...

..... whereas by contrast the Cantonese dialect offers an ultra rich lexicon with exciting arithmetical pemutations in the use of obscenities, vulgararisms, saucy puns, sexy innuendoes and terrifying curses … whereby she convincingly demonstrated that evident truth to blushing me, yes, even a bloke who has dodgy comprehension of Cantonese.

Sure as hell Cantonese makes verbal intercourse more sizzling and titillating. And I do wonder at the karmic coincidence of Dean's parents-in-law living in Cantonese-speaking Ipoh.

Now, a secret – and I hope I am not compromising the confidentiality of Dean’s discussion with me. He’s actually pissed off with Malaysiakini changing the title of his article into what has been published, namely ‘Land of the rotten, home of the gullible’.

Married to a Malaysian and one himself at heart, Dean cringed at the very thought that Malaysians may find the title of his article insulting as those words would seem to imply that we are greedy and gullible, which he assured me were not his thoughts at all. The title has misrepresented his true views.

And to make it worse, ‘Land of the rotten, home of the gullible’ appears to paraphrase the well-known phrase 'Home of the brave, land of the free', perhaps even suggesting the article is about the US – God forbid!

In fact I would say Dean’s quite distressed with the Malaysiakini editor’s 'sense of creativity', though mind you, he didn’t mention anything about Malaysiakini editors.

I did ..... as I used to be a regular contributor of letters to Malaysiakini, I laughingly told Dean about my own experience with the Malaysiakini butchers of my masterpieces - wakakaka!

Dean’s original title for that piece was 'Sodomy beats sodUMNy', perhaps with the letter 'U' best read twice ;-)