No offense to any happily Greek participants. At my school it was just sanctioned cruelty and debasement...to both sexes.
So I'm gathering that Greek means fraternities and sororities? afaik, that doesn't happen over here.
Er - I realise that the Academic family thing (particularly with the mention of Latin) may sound similar, but my understanding of fraternities and sororities is that there's a definite prestige/snobbery/exclusivity component? Whereas the academic families were just a very haphazard way of getting to know a randomly wider circle of people. Well, and having a good time on Raisin Weekend. The vast vast vast majority of people participate. (I had 3 Academic mums and 2 Academic dads, myself.)
Logic dictates that there must be badness going on during Raisin Weekend (and Google tells me that Young People Today are clearly far more loutish than they were in my day), and during my final Raisin Weekend I was one of the volunteers who got trained in first aid and was in the Union giving out water and rendering assistance to any freshers who found themselves incapacitated - still, my own experience, and those of everyone else I spoke to* was very positive. I adopted several kids myself - in a collecting up orphans to be sure they had a fun time on Raisin Weekend kind of way. (said weekend DID involve a day of drunken debauchery, but the rituals of the following day involved the mums dressing the kids up in some kind of costume - all the girls in my family got dressed up as devils while the boys were dressed as angels - I remember being impressed by one large family that made a sort of card board swimming pool and all the kids were in the swimsuits and bathing caps, executing a sort of faux water ballet thing...although, it being Scotland and October, they can't have been too warm. There were also the ubiquitous human condoms, various members of the royal family, various members of the Star Ship Enterprise - oh, just whatever people could come up with. You had to give your father a bottle of wine (or you could try to give him a pound of raisins, but he may well be unimpressed by this) and in exchange he gives you a receipt written in Latin on something cumbersome. You have to carry this with you when you go to the quad in your silly outfit - I had a large inflatable shark, iirc, but I remember seeing some poor soul lugging a car door along. You also give your mum a bottle of wine and she gives you a 'raisin string' - ie something representative of you that you can hang on your gown with a string. (Thus any formal occasion where the students are wearing their gowns, such as Debates**, you'll see them striding around being serious while they've got, I don't know, a Hello Kitty doll or a dildo or something dangling off their gown on a string. (I had a set of chattering teeth from one mum, a miniature Sylvester The Cat doll from another, and a packet of Bourbon Creams from another [recalling a particularly surreal conversation about 'Wuthering Heights' and biscuits]). In the quad, there is a huge foam fight. Then everyone trudges home for a shower and a nap.
*I realise that it's entirely possible some of my friends had bad experiences and didn't make this public. My room-mate got monstrously drunk and flaked out early in the day, but afaik that was the worst that happened to her - sleeping in clothes she'd barfed on.
**I remember attending a Debate one time - you're only allowed to speak if you're wearing a gown, or at least that WAS the case in my day, don't know if it still holds true - and being most impressed that an American Exchange student was attending & speaking in a bright red dressing gown with polka dots. Good idea, that man.
