“Goat Room” and other terms

  • A thorough post on the use of goats in fraternity imagery covers the use of the term “goat room” to describe a meeting room. That term has been used a number of Dartmouth houses including Tri-Kap, Beta Theta Pi, Phi Gamma Delta, Zeta Psi, Sigma Nu, and Psi Upsilon. The first Goat Room built by Beta is visible at the far right of a photo on the Town’s Flickr photostream.
  • Bob Donin’s 2011 oral history interview with William Jenkins ’43 and his wife Mary contains these linguistic observations on page 18:

    MARY: […] And the other thing that’s interesting—and I’ve talked about this to my few good friends who are still around who grew up here—when we said campus, we meant the Green. And it was never called the Green.

    DONIN: Oh, it wasn’t called the Green back then?

    MARY: Well, at least not by any of us. Never used the word Green. And when we said campus, which was an incorrect use of the word obviously, we meant the Green. I’ll meet you on campus. I’ll meet— you know, use it in that context. And it’s very interesting to see the evolution. And another thing that’s different: When you were in college and I was dating and stuff, the word “frat” was considered to be a state university word, and everyone looked down their nose at it, and they never under any conditions would use the word “frat,” meaning fraternity. And now it’s I think commonly used.

    DONIN: So what did you call—oh, you called it a fraternity.

    MARY: A fraternity. Or by the Greek name.

  • A Valley News blurb refers to plans “for a six-story addition just south of the main entrance” of DHMC, for research. Presumably this is the Williamson Translational Research Center.
  • A nice history of the building of the Ray School.
  • A new Maine Heraldry Blog is promising. Go moose-deer!
  • Rauner Library is allowing visitors to lick one of the books in its collection.
  • Thanks to Robert Goodby for citing the Notes toward a Catalog… in the 2006 Lebanon Slate Mill conservation study (pdf). Thanks for the citations to Halls, Tombs and Houses by Blake Gumprecht in The American College Town (UMass Press, 2010) and Carole Zellie in the University of Minnesota Greek Letter Chapter House Designation Study (2003). Glad the Review has adopted this site’s analysis of the new Inn addition.
  • Brilliant. Another post in praise of the aerial photo provided by Bing:

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[Update 11.04.2012: Beta photo link added.]

2 thoughts on ““Goat Room” and other terms

  1. I can’t say I remember the second, but I remember the first, an obvious backronym. I would guess it is from the 1970s, but I have no idea. It’s not found in the 1920s.

  2. Surely you recall:

    — that Sigma Nu’s “Goat” Room was spelled “GOTE,” for “Gathering of the Elite”

    and that old saw:

    — “Don’t call a fraternity a frat; would you call your country a c*nt?”

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