things kevin hates

One of the downfalls of being a classicist is knowing the Greek alphabet, and seeing how often it is horribly misused makes me cringe. Most people having a passing familiarity with most Greek letters, either from high school math classes or college fraternities and sororities, and many people can even match each letter to its name. But knowing the actual sounds? Heaven forbid! So society is deluged with ad campaigns that throw in a few Greek letters with no regard for what they are except for having a passing resemblance to a completely different English letter.

Take this poster for the new movie Sorority Row:

See that line in the middle of the second “O”? That makes it a theta. A theta makes a “th” sound. So the movie is apparently Sorthrity Row. What the fuck is a sorthrity? (Also, I’m somewhat disappointed that they passed on the opportunity to call their movie Sorority Rho.)

On a similar note, consider this poster from a not-so-new movie:

See those things that look kind of like the letter “E” in the middle of the word Greek. Apparently the marketing geniuses thought that Greek’s actual letter “E” looks too much like an English letter “E”–in fact, they’re the same thing. So they changed to these squiqqly looking things, which, as you may remember is actually a sigma. That’s equivalent to our letter “S.” So the movie is actually My Big Fat Grssk Wedding. The same error is made by the geniuses behind the TV show Greek (or Grssk).

It’s not just the Madison Avenue types making this error. Very often my facebook news feed is inundated with the goings-on of various fraternities and sororities (and sometimes even Greek letter honor societies too), and many of their members can’t be bothered to take the time to find the actual Greek letters, even though just about every single font supports at least the capital letters of the Greek alphabet. So I’ll see “Π” rendered as “II,” “Σ” as “S,” etc. Some fraternities even have incorrect names. At Loyola, one fraternity attempted to name themselves “Beggars,” but when one gamma comes before another, it actually has an “ng” sound instead of a g. So they walked around with shirts that said “Bengars” on them, much to the amusement of us classicists.

Also, sometimes people, when they want to make something look Greek, just type whatever they want to say into Symbol. Don’t do this. Back in high school, I was at a quiz bowl tournament, which, if memory serves, was taking place at Dominican. On the wall of one of the classrooms was a project someone did about Athens. Except instead of Athens, the Greek letters said a-tay-ens, with a tau and an eta instead of a theta.

So please, copywriters and sorority girls of the world, ask a classicist before you butcher the poor Greek language. Or else all twelve of us will be very, very mad at you.