A friend I knew pledged an MIT frat in the 80's. The upperclassmen realized that you could get goat heads for like 50 cents a pound at one of the local stores. For one of their hazing pranks, they gave each pledge a goat head and instructions to hide the goat head on campus, which whichever head was hidden the "best" would get a prize.
The resulting kerfuffle and news articles on the incident (including allegations of satanism on the MIT campus) is definitely something that frat will be proud of forever.
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
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 :)
The resulting kerfuffle and news articles on the incident (including allegations of satanism on the MIT campus) is definitely something that frat will be proud of forever.