Fratty Talk

Yes it's Dartmouth but this entry could apply to any school where fraternities play a large part of social life. Keeping up the level of discourse, something to think about.- NFFY

Think back to all the time you spent learning SAT vocabulary during your sophomore and junior years of high school. You still remember the definitions of words like “timorous” and “torpor”. They found their way into use in real life, first deliberate, perhaps forced and then slipping easily and appropriately into conversation sometime around frosh year. After you've settled in, the only place that they now seem appropriate is in a paper written to wow a Writing 5 professor or in your senior thesis, or in any of the papers that come in between. This is still Dartmouth.

On the other hand, just as those words have vacated the crevasses of daily speech part of your brain, other words have entered to take their place. These words are a little easier to understand and don’t challenge you or stress you in the same ways that the SAT vocabulary did. Include here words and phrases such as “boot,” “soil,” “throw save” and “pull the trigger.”

By all means, I appreciate the use of these tasteful words in the appropriate context. When one has had too much to drink and is feeling like he or she might be sick on the walk home, yes, it is only fitting to “pull the trigger and boot.” I even appreciate overhearing these words in hushed tones at the Hop the next morning.

I just don’t appreciate it when they take on such a frequency and lack of variety that interactions become almost standard and go by without any mental effort or presence. We'll be carrying our fratty collegiate slang for life, even when our children look at it as a sign of how stale and dated we are, so we should practice mixing it in with intelligent conversation, not using it to replace intelligent conversation.

“Hey bro, what’s the line like?”

“Two or three. Here, you want a beer in the meantime?” This is just one snapshot of an interaction.

I have a theory on how we all got so dumbed down in terms of language. We came to Dartmouth, and from the moment we were introduced to the fraternity scene, we observed ultra-fratty behavior from the upperclassmen. We started incorporating fratty vocabulary into our own lexicon to be ironic and mock the guy "who was booting his face off last night.” And we thought we were funny, and above it.

And then October came. And then November. And we were still making the same jokes, not realizing that, to an outside observer, those words and mundane topics had integrated themselves completely into our vocabulary. The jocular tone has entirely left our speech when we say, “I think I’m just going to hit up [insert fraternity] and black out.” Conversations that occur in basements carry over into our everyday lives.

It makes sense for different activities and mindsets to have different vocabulary sets associated with them.

But wouldn’t it be great if they didn’t have different intelligence levels tied to them? What if, in the basement, we used the variations in topics, sentence structure and word choice that we use in our papers?

Okay, so maybe that idea’s a little over the top. But still, we should stop treating fraternity houses like Vegas; they are not an oasis in the desert of rules and etiquette. This is not to say that we should just take the house out into the world, but rather put some of the real world in the house.

Go ahead. Talk about something interesting. I realize that there are four entire pong games to spectate and comment on. And by all means, if there is a throw save sink, then please comment. However, there are also other things to talk about; maybe even economics, policy, social issues, history? You can come up with your own topic of conversation. But barring that miraculous throw save, it wouldn’t kill you at least discuss a mix of pong and political theory.