Bona Fide

“We have two kinds of ‘conference.’ One is that to which the office boy refers when he tells the applicant for a job that Mr. Blevitch is ‘in conference.’ This means that Mr. Blevitch is in good health and reading the paper, but otherwise unoccupied. The other type of ‘conference’ is bona fide in so far as it implies that three or four men are talking together in one room, and don’t want to be disturbed.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)