Abogados or Abogagos

In the Philippines, the word abogado is the Filipino language translation of the English word lawyer, which we all know is a person who is a practitioner and member of legal profession.

Filipinos are by nature a happy go lucky and indifferent people who possessed the weird ability and tendency to laugh at their own misery and foolishness. And as it is a common knowledge that most Filipino lawyers has the cunning ability to twist the truth, it is also a common practice among Filipino commoners to change the word abogado to abogago and to call a certain lawyer abogago when that particular lawyer showed sign of twisted intelligence.

Abogago is derived from the word gago that describes a moron or a cunningly shrewd person; conclusively, abogago is a person, a lawyer who is either a moron or cunningly shrewd. Like the newly invented sarcastic tagalog word "noynoying", abogago is also a colloquial word, which I believe is not yet present in any Filipino dictionary. And although it has been around for quite some time, still, it is a new word, a new word invention of a satirist's fertile mind intended to ridicule the stupidity and perversion of many Filipino practitioners of law.

Abogagos truly exist and are real. And it is not an accident that a single letter is what separates the real from fake and wicked lawyers because it is not easy to perceive the difference between them; for the reason that, most of them had gone to the same school, read the same book, taught by the same teacher, members of the same fraternity or religion, and both are living in a relatively small society that accepts the doctrines of co-existence and jungle survival. And both are influenced if not corrupted by their country's widespread culture of corruption.

The recent impeachment trial of the Philippines Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona clearly showed that these illegal immoral legal mutants not only do exist but also do evolve, and it appears that they had evolved better and greater than their counterpart both in numbers and in quality.

The voice of the people is the voice of God; and the recent survey showed that 50% of Filipinos, with only around 10% who taught otherwise, are convinced that the Chief Justice is guilty and should be impeach. However, the Chief Justice' battery of renowned lawyers headed by a former associate Supreme Court Justice (Serafin Cuevas) are holding on to their arguments that Renato Corona is clean. I hope that Cuevas and company are right and honest for their claim; because if they are not, despite their great wit, learning, and brilliance, they are nothing but bunch of abogagos, which for many filipinos and according to Urban Dictionary means stupid or asshole.

NOTE: It is written, "In earning one's livelihood falsity is not condemned". But is this injunction applicable and will it justify a person's untruthfulness to a whole nation, to the world, and to history and when that falsity will affect the future and morality of a country.