Word: bickerer
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...basis of a few minutes of stereotyped small talk the committees rate the eligibles, and the cubs immediately begin cutting their lists, most "from the top" as well as "from the bottom." Each night fewer clubs come calling at a given room. If, on the last night of the Bicker period, a sophomore is still receiving a committee, he has probably procured a "first-list bid." If not, and he has good friends whom a certain club, is anxious to have, he may receive a "second-list bid" that will get him in if they accept their first-list bids...
...Bicker reaches its colorful climax during Open House...
...stroll with anxious expectation across the broad lawn up to the great white columns of Colonial's porch. The door swings open and you and your group (throughout Bicker, you move in a group of three or four--you are judged, accepted, and perhaps rejected collectively) are swept into the dazzling warm uproar inside. You feel the soft depth of the rug beneath your feet and can see a bright, glittering, well-groomed haze all around you. Up the grand stairway, lined with upperclassmen clapping and cheering, until you reach the top where beaming and blushing abashedly you sign your...
...piercing cold: one lifts his hands to the frigid heavens and races down the street backward, his scarf and topcoat wildly flapping in the wind, crying out in ecstasy. "Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord!" The unbroken tension of weeks--of a year and a half for some, has ended. Bicker is over at last, for them...
...outsider observing Bicker finds it difficult to take the whole thing seriously. The enormous anxieties generated in every member of the sophomore class, the superficiality and downright silliness of its standards and ceremonies, the blatant injustices of the values and principles the system inculcates--all would seem ludicrous in any civilized community, but they are doubly comic when set in one of the nation's greatest universities and practices by what is supposed to be a substantial segment of this generation's intellectual elite...