Quote:
Originally posted by veemers
I think if you go back far enough, each of the greek letters actually does mean something real, because when I was pledging, one of my sisters told me that way back when, GLO's picked their letters because of their meanings. Perhaps the meanings were mixed up or lost over the years, but it seemed to me to be a good reason to choose certain letters.
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My opinion is that the founders picked letters that maybe matched the meaning/purpose/motto of the group they were creating. I'm pretty certain that the Alpha in AST doesn't have the same meaning as the Alpha in ASA or AOII.
Example: I'm creating a sorority and I want the deep, sisters-only ritual meaning to be something like "Loyalty and Honor". So I might pick the greek letters Lambda for Loyalty, and Eta for Honor. My new sorority would be Lambda Eta. Or I might know that Chi is similar to kai, meaning "and". So it could be Lambda Chi Eta. Or if that sounded funny, I could add "Truth" to my motto (Loyalty, Honor, Truth) and my letters could be Lambda Eta Tau. But Loyalty, Honor, Truth isn't going to be my open motto, it's the secret meaning of my letters. I could then create an open motto to match my letters anyway. Or I could create something different.
Or if I knew enough about Latin and Greek languages, I could really get creative. But I don't, so there's the simple example.
The fact that AST's open motto (Active, Self Reliant, and Trustworthy) matches the letters A, S, and T isn't an accident. BUT, it's not the true meaning of our letters that's learned in ritual. The one's who came up with the open motto decided to match it to A, S, and T (for reasons I don't know for sure).
In short, I don't think everyone's greek letters stand for the same thing. Every Alpha doesn't mean the same in ritual, etc.
(sorry for the rambling, but the example was kinda fun to come up with!)
PsychTau
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