Quote:
Originally Posted by MaggieXi
I agree that this is a great blog and the term "baby" should not be used to refer to or describe new members of any organization. I know that the term "baby" came about when I was a junior (gah! 13 years ago!). It was the year that Rush became recruitment, Rushees became Potential New Members and Pledges became New Members. Campus panhellenic had decreed that we were to use all the new terms and added that we were not allowed to call the new members, or even the PNMs "Girls" or even "new girls" or "Ladies" because it was derogatory (I'm not sure how Ladies was derogatory, but it was on the list of words that we could no longer use). However, the word Baby was not on the list.
So the sororities who had names for their new members - Phis for Phi Mu, Rosebuds for AOPi, continued on with their tradition. Since the rest of the orgs on campus didn't have names for their new members and could essentially only call them mouthful "new members", and a year before called them pledges, adopted new names for the them. Zeta had "Zeta Babies", AXiD had "Little Xis", Sigma Kappa had "Kappa Kuties", etc. I don't know when all of them changed over to "Babies", but eventually they did. But I think a lot of this Baby calling came out of the fact that they could no longer be called "Pledges" and "New Members" is a mouthful and boring if you compare it to the groups that have names for their new members.
IMO, Pledges is far less derogatory than Babies.
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Agreed. I've said this previously: every org should come up with a respectful name for its new members and use that uniformly. Officially, I only know of the two you mention above and Alphas for ADPi, and while I'm sure there are others, some don't have anything, and nobody is going to say "new member".
Incidentally, the writers of this and the other article on this topic come from Theta and APhi, two groups that don't have a name for the NM's, AFAIK, so I'll take the giant liberty of suggesting some: "stars" for Theta, and "ivies" for APhi. They get harder from there: AGD..."ferns"?
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