Dedma

The term has been around for some time now. I learned of its proper meaning from Jessica Zafra, that wickedly funny Filipino writer I adore so much. Since I cannot be bothered to search for the particular book where she mentioned its exact meaning among the debris that we call our house, I just Googled it and found the perfect way to explain dedma from here.

combination of the English word dead and the first syllable of the Filipino word malisya = “dead malice”; feigning unawareness; pretending not to know that something is amiss.

If you’ve been blogging for some time now (well, in fact, if you have been breathing for sometime), you most probably have perfected the art of making dedma. If you haven’t, then you’ve just wasted half of your life paying attention to poor excuses for human beings when you really shouldn’t have. I have fallen to that trap several times in the past, especially when it involves someone I care about. But then again, as Alanis Morissette said, you live and you learn. As you live, you learn to make dedma of the people who try to bring you down, who make false accusations against you, who abuses you, who uses you, etc. etc.

And for my part, I live and let live. I know it is inevitable that I’ve hurt some people unknowingly, making me the subject of their art of dedma, but it can’t be helped. You can’t please everybody. So the answer to all our relationship problems? Dedma. When you can’t get his drift about his obsession with manga, you just dedma. When you can’t get around your head with her addiction to blogging, you just dedma. If you are pounced on by rip-offs and link whores who have made your living days more irritating than it normally is, you just dedma. If you’re annoyed by bossy people who have auto-grabbing software… oookay. Let’s not go there anymore. Dedma’s partner is karma.