You're spot on with your question: it was about mid-2010 that Facebook decided that the two choices for responding to a friend request shouldn't be "confirm" or "delete" but instead "confirm" or "I'll think about it and answer later, if I can find where these saved requests are actually stored in Facebook". (okay, that's probably not how they were thinking about it, but that's what it's ended up being)

I don't really get it, truth be told. When I see a friend request, I either respond favorably or negatively to it, I don't need to think about it or ask a few other friends whether they're in the cabal or not. So why have the intermediate step?

We might never know. All we can do is figure out how to work with Facebook so we can try and keep our friend pool reasonably pure, right?

Let's start from the top, though. Here I am on Facebook and I have two visible indicators that I have some friend requests pending:

You can see here that there are two places it's showing "9" pending friend requests, one on the top left, and the other on the left list of areas (the latter of which I've highlighted). Click on the top element and a menu pops down with a summary of names and friend options:

At this point if I see someone I recognize, I can click "Confirm" right within the menu, as I've done with Kathy Druckman. The result, still within the menu:

Instead of going through these one-by-one, however, click on "See All Friend Requests" and we'll be able to find the rejected and deferred friends too.

At this point, there's a bit more information on each friend request. For this demo, I'm going to defer, and then delete, the friend requests from Nathan:

When I click on "Not Now" (which used to be "Delete") what happens?

Rather than having to defer a friend request as a way to find the deferred "not now" Facebook friend requests, there's a better way to find them: scroll down to the bottom of the page of friend requests and look on the lower left. In small print is:

Click on "See Hidden Requests" and suddenly all the deferred requests from people to become your friends on Facebook appear:

I could go through the nine one-at-a-time to ensure that I haven't missed a legitimate friend in the rabble and spam, but I'm lazy so I'll just give everyone the boot. To accomplish that, I'm going to click on the "Delete all hidden requests" link on the top right of the hidden area.

Facebook confirms that's really what I want to do. I mean, rejecting possible friends? :-)

That's the path I want to take, karma be damned, so I click on "OK":

That's it. Those nine potential friends who I just wanted to forget about are now gone from my life. Quickly and (relatively) easily done.