Now, at a particular time. Originally a journalistic locution for the simple word now, this verbose expression is a twentieth-century cliché. Another version, from sports, is at this stage of the game. Both represent an attempt to be legalistically specific. Indeed, an Atlantic Monthly article of January 1975 pointed out, “The phrase ‘at that point in time’ . . . quickly became an early trademark of the whole Watergate affair,” a political scandal in which everyone tried to deny knowledge of and/or participation in various events.