Random Things You've Learned from GC

[cheerfulgreek]

Originally Posted by carnation

I am a Spanish professor and teacher, and I know what zumbado means--it's the past participle of zumbar and you would used it like this: "la abeja ha zumbado", the bee has buzzed.

Zumbedo, one of my brothers' made up words. is pronunced "ZOOMbeedoe" and since we weren't allowed to insult people, they used it as one of their insults and my mother wouldn't understand. That one was used to describe people they didn't even have words for because they were so disgusted or mad.

lol
I see now. I had two years Spanish in high school and two years in undergrad. But, I don’t remember any of it — maybe like a few words that stood out to me back then. Some of my customers are Spanish speaking customers and speak very little English. Thank God we have phone translator apps now. Because of that, being able to speak it as a second language would be very helpful in my profession.

Kind of a different topic, but your post here is also why I enjoyed learning what GCers did/do for a living. I knew you were a professor but I didn’t know you teach Spanish.

[Zach]

Originally Posted by Sen's Revenge

But you know what white privilege means, and what you are describing doesn't negate white privilege.

For those who are observing this exchange, white privilege does not mean that a white person automatically has a better life in every community all the time. It means, in part, that white people are members of a legacy club (that they did not choose to be part of) that grants them better opportunities because of biases that are common in this society.

Examples:

A white child can pick up a science fiction or fantasy novel and see themselves represented most of the time. The existence of Black sci-fi fantasy does not negate whiteness being accepted as the default face for humanity.

Predominately white fraternity/sorority life is seen as the default kind of fraternity life, despite Black fraternal life having more life-long activity and a much larger community service imprint. Additionally, a white person can be guaranteed to not be excluded from the default Greek life on the basis of their race -- and would still be considered (if not fetishized!) if they were interested in Black Greek life.

I'm not even going to get into examples from policing or science/medicine.

In short, nobody ever said that "white privilege" is the same as living a "privileged" life. There are surely poor white people.

Facts and well said.

[Zach]

Can’t say I’ve learned anything. Not a lot going on since I’ve been posting on here, which hasn’t been long.

[Cheerio]

As an educated guess, I've noticed the highly popular "What do you feel like saying, right now?" GC thread may tally ten million views and 70,000 responses by the end of 2024.

(Not that it's anything I've learned, pretty much just a random observation.)

[Zach]

What I observed about this site compared to Black Greek Forums, where I was a regular, I didn’t see the moderators over there chatting with the regular members like they do here. If they did, it wasn’t much. Over here, the moderators are in conversation with most everybody. But then again, over here, it’s about five regulars posting, more than half of those are moderators. There’s three popular threads here, two of them are “you say this, I say that” threads. Just an observation.

[carnation]

Part of that might be because GC has been around so long that a lot of us are longtime friends on social media.

But we love to come here too!

[Phrozen Sands]

I can say I enjoyed reading CG’s and aggieAXO’s posts to each other about life as a veterinarian. Learned some things there, although most of what they were talking about to each other was foreign, to me. But I got a lot of free advice about my dog from them. I found a good vet because of them, too.

[cheerfulgreek]

Originally Posted by Phrozen Sands

I can say I enjoyed reading CG’s and aggieAXO’s posts to each other about life as a veterinarian. Learned some things there, although most of what they were talking about to each other was foreign, to me. But I got a lot of free advice about my dog from them. I found a good vet because of them, too.

Ohhhh no, that wasn’t free! You owe us, Mister! You can pay on the “Buy a Coffee” thread.

[honeychile]

I think we all had fraternities & sororities that we enjoyed working with, or our GLO had a lot of friends with another GLO. I learned on GreekChat that not every member of ABC or XYZ was a back stabbing slut and not every DEF or PQR was a drug dealing alcoholic.

I also learned that the Greek Experience can vary greatly from campus to campus. For example, sororities with houses are different from those whose campus insists that sororities must be in on-campus suites, or only have meeting rooms.