Word: bicker
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Marsalis' roots, like those of jazz, go back to the steamy, sensual city of his birth. Scholars bicker over exactly where and when jazz was born, but there is no doubt that its first identifiable players -- like the legendary trumpeter Buddy Bolden -- appeared in the dance halls, honky-tonks and bordellos of New Orleans around the turn of the century. In the hands of such men as King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton and Sidney Bechet, the story goes, the music thrived until the closing of the red-light district in 1917 sent many of the Crescent City...
...chief victim of Wolff's sharp prose is the bizarre Princeton tradition of "Bicker," a two-week period of psychological torture originally designed to determine which Princeton men had what it took to join the college's exclusive eating clubs. The tradition has become a not-so-illustrious chapter in the university's illustrious past--many clubs are no longer exclusive, and some students entirely reject the clubs. A recent court decision requiring the two remaining all-male clubs to admit women is the final blow to this bastion of the old boy network...
...Bicker in the late 1950s, as Wolff describes it, was a positively hellish experience. "The institution of Bicker is too perversely odd for my fancy to have fabricated," Wolff writes in the author's note. Sophomores register themselves in "Preferentials," groups of students who want to join the same club. The Preferentials go everywhere together--to meals, to tour the various clubs--but for the most part just wait for the upper-class club members to visit them and ask trite questions meant to discriminate between the gentlemen and the well-not-our-kinds...
Another strange twist on this ceremony of exculsivity is Princeton's grafting onto it the American love of equality. The university's egalitarian addition to the ancient ritual of selection and rejection is the condition that everyone who bickers must be offered a bid by at least one club. Princeton mandates that one hundred percent of Bicker's participants find a home, or at least a dinner table. And so, at the very end of Bicker, while the chosen few are welcomed through the distinguished doors of Ivy, or Cottage, or Cap and Gown, and while those less fortunate console...
Clay finds that the ruthlessness of Bicker is not meant to shape character, but to test it. Only those who possess the perfect graces of class and charm can successfully scale the ivied walls of discrimination...