Youth own their language—leave them alone
It has been decades since I was a student, and I relished every excuse to return to UP Diliman. There were new buildings I didn’t recognize, and the same tired, crumbling ones that somehow remain standing.
After completing my health clearance at the UP Health Service, I rewarded myself with a Korean corndog at the food court in Dilimall, the new and highly controversial commercial space occupying the site of the old Shopping Center. While sitting alone, I couldn’t help overhearing the conversation at the next table.
“So are you meeting them at Palms?”
“Uy, daming inorder. Amaccana!”
I understood the conversation contextually, but I did not understand the references. Half amused and half fascinated, I realized I had become what every returning alumnus eventually becomes: a visitor in a place that once felt entirely my own.
“Correct” campus language
A few days later, I stumbled upon a post on a UP Freedom Wall page. “Sa mga student number 2003 pataas. This is a PSA. Please tigil-tigilan niyo pag-butcher ng names ng buildings. Nakakahiya. It’s AS, not Palms. Don’t call CBA by the crony’s name. It’s Eduk. Lastly, it’s MASKOM, not Plads. Hindi ito all-boys school sa Greenhills, mga nak.”
It was meant to be funny. Thousands apparently agreed. I didn’t. Not because I suddenly preferred “Palms” over “AS.” In truth, I still instinctively call it AS myself.
What bothered me was this: the confidence with which older generations appoint themselves custodians of “correct” campus language while forgetting that they, too, inherited—and reshaped—the vocabulary of the university.
When I entered UP in the late ’90s, older cousins patiently briefed me on the campus lexicon. Don’t call it Palma Hall, lest you want to be bullied, they warned. It’s AS. Don’t embarrass yourself by asking where TBA is. It doesn’t stand for Theodoro Bacchani auditorium, as some pranksters would tell you it’s located at the Math building; it simply means “to be announced.” Every generation of Iskolar inherits these little linguistic rites of passage.
Even “AS” was once a newer way of referring to the Arts and Sciences building where Palma Hall is located. It has since been collapsed into different colleges and departments.
That’s because language has never been frozen in time—neither has campus culture.
What’s in a word?
Around those same years, another part of campus life was reshaping the way many of us spoke. UP Babaylan—founded in 1992 as the first and longest-running LGBTQIA+ student organization in the Philippines and Asia—was becoming increasingly visible. They had the most fantastic Spice Girls float in the Lantern Parade one year (the exact date escapes me now). I think that was my fag-hag origin story, but I digress.
With that visibility came an awareness of what many of us then called “gay lingo” or swardspeak. Words like charot, chaka, rampa, and booking slipped out of queer spaces and into everyday conversations. They were playful, expressive—and, to some ears then, scandalously improper and crass.
Some of these words were born from genuine defense mechanisms. I had classmates who were punished at home for being perceived as gay, and parents who believed that humiliation—or worse, the old lublob sa balde trope—could somehow force a child to become straight. Queer language emerged despite that hostility or because of it. Marginalized communities carved out spaces where they could name themselves, joke with one another, and speak in ways outsiders couldn’t immediately decode.
Who really has a say in this?
Today, people who have never set foot in queer spaces casually say charot without giving it a second thought. Nowadays, it’s truncated to just chz. Words find their way into the commons when people need them.
That is why the Freedom Wall post felt less amusing than revealing. What disappointed me wasn’t that alumni preferred older names—nostalgia is part of every university experience. It was the absence of curiosity. Rather than asking why today’s students develop their own shorthand, older graduates were quick to declare it wrong, embarrassing, or evidence of declining standards. An excuse to disparage the young.
Young people have always abbreviated, borrowed, clipped, and reinvented language. Social media has accelerated the pace, but it didn’t invent the instinct. Linguists know that language changes because its speakers change. In fact, German philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that language is not merely a tool we use, but the medium through which we encounter the world.
That’s why campus slang is more than convenience. It signals belonging. It tells you who is inside a community and who is merely passing through. I remember discussing this during a class with Dr. Jovie Peregrino—whose work in Filipino language and philosophy at the UP Diliman Department of Filipino and Philippine Literature often explored how language shapes culture, identity, and thought—in my third year.
And perhaps that is what unsettled me most about the online scolding. It wasn’t really about whether it’s called AS or Palms. It was the eagerness to snatch away from young people one of the few things they can truly claim as their own: the language they create for themselves.
Lighten up, uncs
Young people inherit campuses, institutions, and societies they did not build. They have remarkably little control over tuition, policies, economies, or the futures they are told they will someday lead. The least we can do is allow them ownership over the language with which they experience these spaces.
Besides, history suggests they will eventually become the older alumni complaining about whatever name the next generation gives Palma Hall.
So lighten up, uncs and aunties.
Language has never belonged to those who police it. It has always belonged to those who are living it.
Language has never been frozen in time—neither has campus culture.
