THE GRADUATE

With a group of people socializing before the beginning of a meeting, I overheard someone say, "He graduated OSU." I didn't say anything to that person as I was not part of the conversation, but the person next to me noticed my visible wince and asked, "What's wrong?" I said, "FROM; he graduated FROM!" She asked, "What difference does it make?" I said, "Because the word graduate means to be awarded a degree, not to receive one. The school graduated the student, not the other way around." She said, "But doesn't simplicity matter and if you understood what he meant, what difference does it make?"

I hate it when people are sensible!

I felt like screaming, "NO!", but I didn't. Instead, I said: "OSU graduated him; he was graduated from OSU; or he graduated from OSU." My companion reiterated that she couldn't understand the difference. I explained the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs, but I could see HER wincing, so I refrained from any other comments.

See the article from Grammarphobia which addresses that topic. I was stunned that the proofreaders at The New Yorker allowed--or overlooked--this: "He moved to New Jersey after graduating college." The New Yorker is renowned for having the best proofreaders in the magazine industry.

Graduate school

Q: In the recent New Yorker piece about the father of the Sandy Hook killer, Andrew Solomon writes that Adam Lanza’s older brother “moved to New Jersey after graduating college.” GRADUATING COLLEGE? Shouldn’t that be FROM college?

A: We read the same article in the March 17 issue and had the same thought: How did “graduating college” make it through the New Yorker’s copydesk?

Pat’s feeling was that copy-editing standards at the New Yorker might have slipped a notch. But Stewart wondered if the construction had passed into standard English usage since we discussed the issue on the blog eight years ago.

We decided that we ought to reexamine this subject. So in the interest of open-mindedness, here goes.

Back in 2006, we said the verb “graduate” had evolved over the last two centuries, but not enough for this sentence to be considered standard English: “He graduated Stanford in 1986.”

Traditionally, according to our original post, there would be three proper ways to express that sentence:

● “Stanford graduated him in 1986.”

● “He was graduated from Stanford in 1986.”

● “He graduated from Stanford in 1986.”

Most of the usage guides we’ve consulted still object to a sentence like “He graduated Stanford in 1986.”

Why? Because the verb “graduate” originally meant to award a degree, not to receive one. The school graduated the student, not the other way around.

Over the years, the verb “graduate” has evolved, but usage authorities generally believe that the use of “graduate” in that disputed sentence strays too far from the original meaning of the verb.

When the word first showed up in the late 1500s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “graduate” was a transitive verb meaning to confer a university degree.