Phi Beta Delta: Fill & Download for Free

Richard Feynman. Period.For starters, he spent his spare time in strip bars solving physics equations while sketching girls .His last word were “ I'd hate to die twice, it is so boring “Feynman belonged to the phi beta Delta fraternity . He once unhinged the door of a room which belonged to a member of the fraternity and hid it which lead the fraternity on a wild goose chase to find the culprit . Interestingly on two occasions he admitted that he was the one who hid it in a sarcastic tone and no one believed him .When travelling in Brazil he taught physics courses, learned to play an instrument called frigideira and participated in a samba school. Oh, not to mention he plays the bongo too.Believe it or not, Feynman had a minor role in a movie called Anti-Clock where he played a professorWhen young Richard Feynman got bored in the remote New Mexico desert, where he was working on the Manhattan project, he found another hobby — cracking safes. Eventually he became so good, he could open nearly every cabinet containing secret documents. For a fun discussion of this neat story check out this great video from Numberphile.Feynman had a van decorated in his famous diagrams.Feynman was a mind reader . Yes you read that right .I suggest everyone to read “surely you are joking Mr.Feynman “ maybe a little bit of badass rubs over us .It completely slipped my mind . He won the Nobel Prize.

Today I am going to answer one of the truly big questions. It is one of the questions everyone has been wondering for years but never learned the answer to: “Why do fraternities and sororities have Greek letters for names?” I mean, why? Who came up with that idea? Why did it continue? Well, today you are going to finally learn the answer—but it is far stranger and frankly far more hilariously silly than you possibly ever imagined before now.Some historical contextFirst, let us go into a little historical context. In the United States in the late 1700s and early 1800s, higher education was almost completely dominated by the study of Latin and Ancient Greek. Prospective students were required to already know Latin in order to even apply to undergraduate school at most universities.Ancient Greek, meanwhile, was widely seen as an even more prestigious language than Latin. Latin was taught to most schoolboys; whereas if you wanted to learn Greek, you had to go to university. Knowing Ancient Greek meant you were a well-bred, cultured gentleman—a real kalos kagathos.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. That is why the official motto of Yale University, which was founded in 1702, is in Hebrew: אורים ותמים (ʾÛrîm wə-Tummîm), meaning “Light and Truth.” You could not get more pretentious than that!ABOVE: Official crest of Yale University, with their Hebrew motto emblazoned across the pages of the book and the Latin translation of it (“Lux et Veritas”) written on the banner beneath it for the less enlightenedIntroducing the Phi Beta Kappa SocietyThe 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, 1776 at the College of William and Mary. The society seems to have originally been very briefly called Societas Philosophae, which is Latin for “Society of Philosophy.”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. The earliest recorded Latin-letter society at the College of William and Mary was the F.H.C. (whose name stood for “Flat Hat Club”), which was founded in 1750. The American Founding Father Thomas Jefferson (who graduated from the College of William and Mary in 1764) was a member of it. Another Latin-letter society, the P.D.A. Society (who name stood for “Please Don’t Ask”) was founded in March of 1773.The Phi Beta Kappa Society, however, wanted to seem really prestigious and academic, so, instead of picking a Latin letter name like a common organization, they chose a motto in Ancient Greek: Φιλοσοφία Βίου Κυβερνήτης (Philosophía Bíou Kybernḗtēs), which means, “Philosophy is the Guide of Life.” Eventually, the acronym for this motto became the name of the organization itself.ABOVE: Key of the Phi Beta Kappa SocietyThe development of other Greek letter organizationsAs 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.Most of these early Greek letter organizations were not exactly what we think of today when we hear the word “fraternities,” though. 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.The emergence of sororitiesThe first social organization for college women was the Adelphean Society, which was founded in 1851 at Wesleyan Female College, a small, private, women’s college in central Georgia. The original name of this society came from the Greek word ἀδελφός (adelphós), which means “sibling” and could be used to refer to a brother or a sister. It was later renamed Alpha Delta Pi.Originally, Greek letter organizations for women were not called sororities, but rather “female fraternities.” A Latin professor at Syracuse University named Dr. Frank Smalley, however, objected to this word, noting that frater means “brother” in Latin, so a “female fraternity” literally means “female brotherhood,” which he insisted was ridiculous and an oxymoron. Therefore, the esteemed Dr. Smalley insisted that they should be rightly called “sororities,” from Latin soror, meaning “sister.” The name eventually caught on.ABOVE: Photograph of an old building on the campus of Wesleyan Female College, where the first sorority was founded in 1851ConclusionBasically, the whole reason why modern fraternities and sororities use Greek letters for their names is because an honor society over 200 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.(NOTE: I have also published a version of this article on my website titled “Why Do Fraternities and Sororities Have Greek Letters for Names?” Here is a link to the version of the article on my website.)

It is an Honor Society.It is an Honor to be nominated and asked to be a member.It does cost money to be a member.{The price you pay for the honor and to be able to reference that honor on your resume}Here is some background at one particular college:MembershipAnd you can see that there are over 160 chapters across the USA.As an analogy:My son, who graduated from Villanova in 2014, was nominated to two different honor societies. I told him to: accept and I paid the dues for each one. $50 for one and $80 (for life) for the otherWhy?Because it is an Honor with a definitive nomination criteria and standards.And it does look good on a resume when you are seeking your first job out of college.Is Phi Beta Delta worth $50?Was going to the current college you are at worth the money you spent?If the answer to the second question is Yes, then that is the answer to the first question.Good luck and all the best.