The founding members surmised that the Greek name would only be decipherable to students in the know who had the intellectual savvy to recognize the language.
In the early days of fraternities, membership in one was consummate to being a member of a secret society, and using the Greek alphabet was a form of encryption. Although Greek life has become a more accessible and publicly visible phenomenon, chapters still retain this quality of exclusivity and secrecy—specifically around obtaining membership—to this day.
Phi Beta Kappa expanded to the Harvard and Yale campuses by Students found the use of the Greek alphabet as a signifier of academic integrity to be a rich basis on which to build the culture of fraternities and sororities. The only language more prestigious than Ancient Greek was Hebrew, which was taught only to those university students who had mastered both Latin and Greek.
The very first Greek letter organization, the one that started the whole madness of Greek letter names, was the Phi Beta Kappa Society, an elite academic honor society founded on December 5, at the College of William and Mary. Long before the Phi Beta Kappa Society was founded, there was already a longstanding tradition of organizations with Latin letter names at the College of William and Mary.
Another Latin-letter society, the P. As soon as the Phi Beta Kappa Society named itself after a Greek acronym, other organizations started imitating them. At first, the names of all Greek letter organizations stood for mottos in Ancient Greek, which were often kept secret and revealed only to initiates. Although some Greek letter organizations in the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries certainly bore a number of resemblances to modern fraternities, they were still basically thought of as elite honor societies and they were not nearly as prominent on college campuses as fraternities and sororities usually are today.
Ironically, it was in the late nineteenth century, when the influence of classical Greek and Latin was waning, that social fraternities first became truly prominent on American college campuses.
Eventually, as knowledge of Ancient Greek became less common and the study of the language became a less integral part of the American university system, most Greek letter organizations stopped having Greek mottos. Nonetheless, these organizations continued to use Greek letters in their names because that was what they had always done and, by the time they stopped having Greek mottos, Greek letter names had become traditional.
It was later renamed Alpha Delta Pi. Therefore, the esteemed Dr. Basically, the whole reason why modern fraternities and sororities use Greek letters for their names is because an honor society over years ago was being super-pretentious and everyone else followed along until eventually they all just forgot why they started naming themselves after Greek letters to begin with.
Nowadays the names of most fraternities and sororities are just random jumbles of meaningless Greek letters that do not stand for anything. Name required. Search for:. Blog at WordPress. Follow Following. Sign me up. Already have a WordPress.
Log in now. Some universities fostered these organizations by encouraging students to think for themselves. Inevitably, the students in these groups began to form deeper relationships and depend on each other for more than just an intellectually stimulating conversation. Through the end of the nineteenth century, intellectualness was still the center of fraternity life, but the members also made plenty of time to organize parties, sports events, dances and so on.
The members of these groups sometimes lived together in college dorms or boarding houses, but the actual Chapter House did not become common until the 's. Most fraternities before this time were rather small in number, with no more than 30 members if that.
Therefore, they were able to hold meetings on campus in a hall or dorm room. But their small numbers made it financially impossible to obtain a house for only the organization members to live in since they essentially did not have enough members to pay the cost of renting, much less owning a house.
However, in the 's some groups had graduated enough alumni who had become successful and donated money and services to the fraternity to help secure a house for the chapter. The advent of the Chapter House marked the beginning of a period of prosperity and increased growth for fraternities. It also signaled a change in the makeup of the organization and their priorities.
What used to be a special occasion when the fraternity all gathered together all of a sudden became a regular event. While this meant more interaction, it also meant a large part of the attention of the fraternity had to be focused on the house itself.
Alumni had to form boards to become incorporated and handle mortgage payments, legal matters and large repairs or improvements. Active members at the chapter had to handle day to day business, which no longer included only intellectual daydreaming, free expression or academic exploration. It meant cleaning, maintaining, and paying for the property, and in some cases building the house!
Since many of the members were now formally living together, recreational activities came to the forefront since they were spending so much time together. Economic concerns also became a priority, simply because it takes money to own and maintain a property.
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