At some point during a too-infrequent venture off campus, each Princeton student finds himself explaining to outsiders why bickering doesn't only refer to old married couples and how "Frist" can be a verb, the name of a building, or the name of a United States Senator or his son. Princeton has a unique lexicon that can be almost as exclusive and impenetrable as the university itself. Campus slang gives students a sense of belonging as much as it disorients visiting prefrosh and parents — even those who were once students here themselves.
Freshmen immediately find themselves awash in this sea of new vocabulary; oft-used and unexplained terms like "prox" and "zees" can make newcomers feel as if they jumped in to the deep end of the Princeton pool without their water wings. Most, however, rapidly adapt with a little help from older students and advisors and begin doing flying somersaults off the linguistic springboard in no time.
The majority of the terminology is harmless. Shortened place names seem to be the most popular, as well as the most transparent in their derivation. These include the Wa for Wawa Food Market, MoDo for Murray Dodge, the Stone or Harvey S. for Firestone Library, the Ceej for the Center for Jewish Life, E-quad for the engineering quadrant and D-bar for the Debasement bar on the graduate student campus. These place names also seem to readily adapt to usage as verbs, as when one study or late-meal-bound friend asks another, "Do you want to Frist this afternoon?"
Some of the language is academic-related, but this area of campus life does not seem to generate as creative terminology. There's "cluster," referring to the clusters of university computers at various locations around campus, and "p/d/f," referring to taking a class without receiving a letter grade. This latter term has a much more extended usage, and has been adopted into general conversation as a way of describing some activity that an individual completes or partakes of, but without their usual engagement — intellectual, emotional or otherwise. For example, a young man may say to one of his confidants, "I'm totally pdf-ing this relationship," meaning that he is in a relationship with someone, but is not putting much energy or commitment into it.
Of course, the most fertile environment for Princeton slang is the Street — technically Prospect Avenue. The Street produces more Princeton-specific terms than Joyce Carol Oates does novels. There are, of course, the traditional Street terms like "bicker," used to describe the process of selection of new members for the exclusive eating clubs, and "hosing," used to describe rejection of students by said clubs.
Students are constantly generating more Street-related words. For example, one student said, "there's [the phrase] third floor — taken from third floor bicker — [which] can be a general prefix to mean getting things through sexual favors, etc." The ubiquitousness of such a phrase is uncertain, but its prevalence at late meal — along with several less palatable phrases that cannot, fortunately or unfortunately, be printed — suggests it is being adopted at a quickening pace.
Some of the more interesting new terms with a considerably limited, though not unnoticeable, group of users include "Precept Gladiator" and "Holy Grailer." The first refers to a verbally competitive classmate who tries to dominate his or her precept and discredit the comments of every other student. As its coiner stated, the term "Holy Grailer" describes "anyone who is constantly questing for greater and greater awards/clubs/USG positions/destinies/futures. Many 'tools' wish they were 'grailers,' but these are distinct genuses."
The concept of a "tool" or "toolishness" is perhaps one of the most prevalent on the Princeton campus, though it is not specific to the university. One student defined "tool" as a "high-powered, self-important, usually only marginally competent individual who considers it his or her personal responsibility to appear to be running the entire school, regardless of how much he or she actually does." The term also generally implies an individual's conformity to stereotypically preppy dress or ideologies and preferences. In fact, many of the individuals on the Princeton campus who are classified as "tools" are termed thus primarily because of their appearance.
While many of these labels are used in jest, they suggest a lesser-noted and less-appealing underbelly to the beast of Princeton slang. As with any language, Princeton slang reflects the beliefs and experiences of those who use it. The college dialect too often produces terms that promote the classification of individuals into narrowly defined categories.
Attire should not in and of itself result in the categorization of students as a comment on their character. Excessive usage of terms such as "tool" reveals our tendency to categorize people and activities too hastily. We must be skeptical of these labels.
The development of such language is, of course, not limited to Princeton or the Princeton of today. In fact, slang is such a tradition that it is rarely questioned. However, as students continue to develop new terms — as they inevitably will and perhaps even should — they should first consider the ideology underlying these terms and the implication that these terms could have.
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