Linguistics and Language

Re “Princeton Patter”: The term “face time” came into use during the Clinton administration, meaning “minutes spent with someone important.” This prompted me to send New York Times language maven Bill Safire a report on “faceman” from the ’60s. He used it as an endnote to his article about the political term in a collection of his “On Language” columns.

“Cepts” denoted “concepts,” not “precepts.” To be perfectly clear, a “cept” was a very boiled-down “concept.” Normally it was a kind of denigration of the term. (Let’s say you hadn’t done the reading and wanted a quick summary.) And yet: In his open-book final exam in the spring of 1969 for “American Political Thought,” the late Professor Gerald Garvey cleverly asked for the 20 key “cepts” in American political thought. The analogous contemporary term might be “takeaway.”

“Swass” is unknown to me (two years behind your source class). Yes to “libe.” You missed a good one: A pizza was a “za”— sometimes with “shrooms”!

Princetonians used the word “bogus” an awful lot in those days, long before it gained any traction elsewhere. Nothing was ever “important” or “pivotal” or “essential.” It was “key.”