National Honor Society PHI UPSILON OMICRON

This evening we attended a short ceremony in which our daughter, Charissa Robinett, was initiated into the PHI UPSILON OMICRON National Honor Society. She left her job in Human Resources at Leggett & Platt in Carthage last August, to go back to school at Pittsburg State University. She is studying in the Family and Consumer Sciences Department, and plans to start her own interior design/home staging business when she graduates.

She has done very well, and of course we're proud of her. The ΦΥΟ Honor Society website (as I heard in the ceremony) says that "the Honor Society name, PHI UPSILON OMICRON, originated from the initial letters of the first, second, and last words of the Greek phrase which means "The Light of the Home." My problem with that (and one of the things that I do is to teach Koine Greek) is that if I were to write the Greek phrase which means "The Light of the Home", I would use only two Greek words, which would look like this (first in lower case letters, then in all upper case letters):

There is indeed a PHI, an UPSILON, and an OMICRON in those two words. The PHI is the initial letter of the word for light. The OMICRON is the initial letter for the word home. Greek would not use, however, a separate word for the English word of, but rather would use a genitive case ending, which in the case of the word for home would end in an UPSILON.

I guess there aren't many Greek scholars in Family and Consumer Sciences. My sister, Jacque, who is pretty smart (she is an older librarian [private joke]), guessed that those were the three Greek letters that had not been used yet for a fraternity, a sorority, or an Honor Society.

At any rate, we're proud of you, Charissa. You go, girl!