I was a child when the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos decreed martial law in 1972, casting a long spell over the Philippines. “Martial-law baby” became the phrase for people like me, Filipinos who grew up under authoritarianism, blind to its buildup. We martial-law babies are living an eerie moment today: With Rodrigo Duterte now president, it’s like history is making a bad pun.

When norms shift, one of the first things to change is language. In a fascist world, shocking neologisms become everyday speech. “Stockade” was a special verb I learned as a little girl. “Na-stockade hiya,” or “he was put in the stockade,” was the explanation for someone jailed for staying out after curfew during martial law. You’d say “na-curfew” when a playmate got stuck in your home after hours and to avoid becoming “na-stockade” would stay for a sleepover.

Language normalized our new un-freedoms. The most mysterious phrase for me as a child was “habeas corpus”; it wasn’t a recent invention, but it was newly common. I would hear it often on public service announcements on TV, not understanding it even after my friend’s sister, a university student in Manila, disappeared. Leticia was an activist, and the Philippine Constabulary, first set up in 1901, during the U.S. colonial period, took her.

We learned later that Leticia had been “salvaged,” or tortured and killed in unknown circumstances — another term of art under martial law. It was a cross of two words: “to savage” and to be “salvaje,” which means wild in Spanish, but naughty or abusive in Tagalog. Add to that obscene joke the play on its meaning in English: to redeem, to extract from a wreck. This new word alone captured the long history of oppression in the Philippines — Spanish, American and self-made. Leticia’s body was never found.