BLL 115 Joshua Gabriel P.

Lontoc Abortion (stairs) At UP Baguio, it is inevitable for students to manipulate the forms and meanings of words for the sole purpose of convenience; either they simplify long words or phrases due to laziness or they loan words from another language to signify a concept which they find hard to express. As a result, a jargon the specialized vocabulary of a particular...group, or activity (Chambers Encyclopedic English Dictionary 1994)was born: the UP Baguio jargon, which consists of words only UP Baguio students understand, like the following: 'LE' (long exam), 'Pregnancy Stairs', 'Lowest' (Canteen beside CSS), 'Central' (the main canteen), 'Manang Mani', etc. One of the words included in the said jargon is 'abortion'. Students use it to refer to the stairs which serves as a path from the lowest canteen to the OSFA (vice versa). The abortion stairs is widely known for its wide steps that require long strides while traversing them. Students joke that if a pregnant woman were to traverse the latter stairs, she could have a miscarriage (an unintentional abortion) while her legs are forced far apart and her uterus is loosely protected by her crotch. Therefore, students now wittingly call the latter stairs 'abortion', instead of the stairs that's so tiring to traverse, it could cause an abortion. Here is a brief etymology of UP Baguio students' 'abortion': Derived from the English word 'abortion' which originally refers to the removal of an embryo or fetus from the uterus (womb) before it is sufficiently developed to survive independently... (Chambers Encyclopedic English Dictionary 1994) Now used by students to refer to a set of stairs; coinage Said by students as 'abortion' instead of 'abortion stairs'; went through the morphological process of clipping e.g. Saan tayo dadaan papuntang lowest, CSS o abortion?