Tag: Adília Lopes

I came across this quotation by Adília Lopes in a video discussion between Bruno Nogueira, Miguel Esteves Cardoso And Rita Blanco (respectively, a comedian, a journalist/writer and an actress). It’s from a book called Bandolim and I’m not sure but I think it might be a whole poem. “Os ricos são foleiros”. I didn’t recognise the word “foleiro”, which is why I started looking at it more closely. A foleiro is someone who makes or sells “foles”. What is a fole? A leather bag, a device for squeezing air into an organ, a bellows, the bag part of a bagpipe (“gaita-de-foles”) or the interior of an accordion… You get the idea. It’s windy. But foleiro, informally, can also mean ordinary, bad quality, shabby, corny… that kind of thing. It’s the fourth definition in priberam.

So the general gist of the ‘poem’ is that the rich are corny, uninteresting and not really worthy of admiration; they just know about money. Well, I can’t argue. Like all extremely true things, it isn’t true, or at least not always but it feels like a good, satisfying, sweeping generalisation and if you’ve ever spent any time reading the twitter feeds of certain silicon valley gazillionaires you’ll know what she’s driving at.