What's the problem with being coño?
MANILA, Philippines - It used to be that the word coño described our local preppy brats — kids who were born into a long line of upper-class privilege, calling their grandparents abu (short for abuelo, meaning grandfather, or abuela, for grandmother), and being largely dependent on their “yayas.” These kids not only wore Sperry top-siders, but also had the boats to go with them; who knew Polo not just as a shirt or a club, but as a real sport. They went to private schools, had expensive cars that came with their own drivers, and had giant mansions to come home to.
But what made these kids infamous was their manner of speaking; A fascinating mixture of Tagalog and English, sprinkled with a little Castilian flavor. It’s been said that this strange dialect of sorts was a symptom of the coño kids’ upbringing. While their parents were away on hostile takeovers or checking up on various international properties, the kids were tethered to their nannies, many of whom spoke a much more broken form of English than their employers. And so the kids learned to fuse everything into what I’d like to call “Spantaglish.”
Over time, the language was assimilated by other people who weren’t exactly born coño, but were within a close enough social range to be exposed to the “make + (insert verb)” and “hassle, pare” phenomenon. It then spread wide enough to gain some haters (which is, as everyone knows, a sign of relevance), but also gained some very desperate admirers. Thus, the pa-coño rich kids were born.
Pa-coño rich kids are also from well-off families, with parents in office or with large businesses, and have a disgusting sense of entitlement. They’re about flash, not class, and will drop the bucks on anything that assures a sense of stature. These kids run around saying things like, “Don’t you know who I am?” (To which I like to reply, “No. Awww, does that make you sad?”) They aren’t coño; they’re social-climbing status-chasers. There is a big difference, and the Twitter world needs to understand this.
If you’re not on Twitter and prefer not to waste time on silliness (I highly recommend it, though), “#conyoproblems” (spelled with “ny” instead of an “ñ” because the creator couldn’t figure out how to insert the “~” — ed) has been a local trending topic for days, spearheaded by an account of the same name. Copycat accounts popped up and other netizens joined in, turning it into a circus. It seems, however, (stay with me here) that the tweets are targeted at pa-coño rich kids rather than actual coño kids. And whether or not the distinction matters to you, it remains that the jokes are in extremely poor taste and quite unfair to the demographic they claim to be about.
Some of the worst ones I’ve seen are about the nannies. I consider myself well-equipped with a sense of humor, but I have yet to see what’s funny about mocking someone who earns a living cleaning someone else’s house and raising someone else’s children. I have yet to see what’s so amusing about implying that if you are from a certain income bracket, maltreating your house help is not only normal, but laughable. To say such things and try to pass them off as funny reveals so much of a person’s capacity for cruel and absolutely classless behavior.
No one should poke fun at the poor for being in need, and it is just as unfair to shame anyone into being apologetic for what they have. If a person’s lot is good, why begrudge them the right to enjoy it? All any of this really does is make it okay to make bullying comments about the things we don’t understand, or things that seem a bit foreign to us, and that’s far from being just another coño problem.
Fact is, being wealthy doesn’t make you a douchebag; it’s being an obnoxious tool that does. Sometimes it just comes with a black Amex, but other times, it comes with as little as 140 characters.
