Of course, by resurrecting bebot and passing it on to the worldwide audience that buys Black Eyed Peas CDs by the hundreds of thousands, apl.de.ap just might make the word current again in the home country. pag na-try ng mga tsik dito ang mga bullboys, wala na silang hahanapin pa." To cite just one example (from the FHM Bullboard webpage, "Aba. So what's the word today's tambays and phrasemakers use in place of bebot? Take your pick: chick or tsik, chickababe, girlylet, tita, lola, kawimenan. Lalaki underwent a similar transformation, though it produced fewer variants: kelolot, kelot.īebot and kelot, unlike the other abovementioned variants, are probably still understood by today's generation, but they're hardly ever heard in actual usage nowadays. That's a joke, okay? Not everything the Lenguador says in this column should be taken as gospel truth.) (Maybe even babe comes from babae, the way pussycat and mother hen are supposed to have evolved from pusa and inahin. The word bebot obviously derives from babae, which probably began as reverse slang, ebaba, and has since undergone various slang permutations: ebubot, babong, bobits, bobitski. Eliot once put it, "slip, slide, perish, decay with imprecision." That's especially true of slang, which is, by definition, ephemeral. Allan Pineda), on whom Malacañang has bestowed a Presidential Medal of Merit-has a Filipino mother and takes commendable pride in his Filipino heritage.īut the dude left the Philippines when he was 14, sometime in 1988 or '89, so I can understand why he sounds a little bit retro to me, using a slang word that I haven't heard in a long time. Okay, it's not exactly Balagtas, but "Bebot, bebot" does have a hypnotic bebop beat to it, like "Hello, Garci."Īs everyone in these parts knows, the songwriter and one of the founding members of the Black Eyed .ap (a.k.a. And it isn't just the title that's in Tagalog. That's right, bebot-as in girl, woman, the female of the species. When the American hip-hop group Black Eyed Peas came back to the Philippines in July for a concert at the Araneta Coliseum, the media were quick to point out that their most recent album, Monkey Business (2005), contained a track titled "Bebot." This brief article in YES! magazine by Jose "Pete" Lacaba was posted on the Plaridel listserv, and a response to it (also included below) came from someone else on that listserv: