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Comment by patrickmay | Hacker News Reader

"Fraternity", please. You wouldn't call a sorority a "sore", would you? You wouldn't call your country a . . . yeah, I'll drop it there.

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Unlike the other two, "frat" has no alternative denotation and is a common alternative to fraternity. By your logic we wouldn't be using "app" or "admin" or "limo" or "memo."

i notice a lot of fraternity members make the "you wouldn't call your country a ...", guess it's just the common chant (amongst others), though i don't understand why they consider 'frat' a derogatory statement

Even as a member of a fraternity, let's be honest calling it a frat is completely acceptable considering it's pretty colloquial.

That is not what we were taught when we were pledges. They must have gotten soft. You guys have it so easy now.

I am going to go out on a limb and say the number of people at Hacker News who pledged is probably small.

Someone else posted "You wouldn't call your sorority ..." but that's just not how the joke goes. Sorry. Gotta do it. I'm telling the joke. Braced for downvotes.

"You wouldn't call your country a..."

And then I realized, that's the first or second half of the joke that got flagkilled :)

I pledged a frat at UMD, majored in comp sci. It was the best 8 weeks I'd never want to do again.

I never, ever understood why people get so fucking offended when someone calls a fraternity a frat. It doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter.

Well if you frat boys will stop calling black people n*ggers, then we'll stop calling you frat boys.

Point taken

No, but I call frat boys both of those things. S.C.'s for short.

I am not sure that the frat system is really in a position at the moment to demand respectable nomenclature from others.

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