For those who don’t know, according to their website, Caltech got rid of fraternities back in the 1930s and replaced them with a “house” system. The first houses were built in a traditional style and had names like “Fleming House”, but since they were being traditional they used the old Roman style, replacing U with V, so it was “FLEMING HOVSE”.
Rather amusingly, they still call the older residential houses “hovses”, but I’m curious as to how it’s pronounced in speech. Or do you ever actually say the word?
I never heard anyone say “hovse” when I was there, but (a) I lived in Ruddock, one of the new houses and (b) that was back in the late 70s, not long after the time when men were men and giants walked the earth, so perhaps this jargon hadn’t developed yet.
True enough, and that’s precisely why it’s dorky – after all, these were indeed carved in this golden era of distinctness between ‘u’ and ‘v’ and to pretend otherwise is, as I said, dorky. But then, what else would we expect from Caltech?
(As a little aside, I’m glad to see proper usage of ‘Caltech’ by non-Techers. And it’s strong validation of bytheway’s authenticity that he used the term ‘Techer’. You can’t be too careful – we wouldn’t want some MIT grad trying to pass himself off as one of us).
Well, that’s the point, I guess. If you go to the website you’ll see that “hovse(s)” is freely written, most often by the residents themselves in their house websites. But, I take it, nobody ever actually pronounces anything other than “house”. Is that right?
I’m curious now as to why it’s supposed to be Caltech and not CalTech, seeing that the word Technology is capitalized in the full title. Just one of those things that is the way it is, because it is, I suppose.
Exactly, but as a sort of ongoing joke they continue to write the word “hovse”. So I was wondering how they actually pronounce that, assuming that they do pronounce it differently from “house”.
No Caltech connection here, but I’m from a town whose City Hall for many years was inscribed MVNICIPAL BVILDING, which my family, who had all read Flannery O’Connor, invariably pronounced muhv-nicipal buh-vilding.
I always figured that, since it’s the least logical of several possible abbreviations, it was intended to identify which writers were intimately familiar with Caltech and which weren’t. Seems pretty arbitrary and mildly elitist to me, but whatever, I still use it – I don’t want to appear to be a poseur!
Yes: “house” in speech; “hovse” (often capital) in pseudo-official text related to Hovse business.
I think it’s just because it looks weird to have a capital letter mid-word. Another example would be “Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory”, which is shortened to “Fermilab” rather than “FermiLab”.
