Books about Fraternities and Sororities

[naraht]

Originally Posted by MysticCat

This is slightly off topic, but I have to share, and this seemed a reasonable place.

Along with keeping an eye open for fraternity/sorority histories, I also keep an eye open for pledge manuals. I've found two in the last few weeks. Yesterday, I was reading through one I bought this weekend (I'll leave the GLO unidentified, but it's the 2006 edition of their manual) and found this in the section on the Greek alphabet:

Adding to the peculiarity of the fraternity language is the fact that a few Greek letters, particularly Xi and Phi, have several pronunciations. After a consonent, they are pronounced "z-eye" and "f-eye." After a vowel the pronuncation changes to "z-ee" ad "f-ee." For example, Alpha Xi Delta is pronounced "Alpha Z-ee Delta," and Theta Xi is pronounced "Theta Z-eye."

I laughed hard at this Greek urban legend being perpetuated in print in a pledge manual -- especially when a page or two later they refer to other orgs, including Alpha Phi Alpha and Alpha Phi Omega. I'm pretty willing to bet that the writer doesn't follow the rule he just recited and call them "Alpha F-ee Alpha" and "Alpha F-ee Omega."

Whichever this GLO is, they aren't alone. When I googled for the quoted text, two *different* Social Fraternities came up as hits (or close hits) for it. These were in copies of their pledge manuals that are in public sections of their National website.