A Word, Please: āGraduateā is a grammatical free-for-all
National Public Radio recently asked listeners to submit their top grammar peeves.
As usually happens when people talk about grammar, control-freak impulses nearly steered the conversation off course, evidenced in replies like how horrible it is that people answer āthank youā with āno problemā instead of āyouāre welcome.ā
Most of the real grammar peeves in the NPR list were issues weāve already discussed in this column, like āliterallyā and ābegs the question.ā But of the top 10 most common gripes, No. 9 surprised me most: āSaying someone āgraduated collegeā instead of āgraduated from college.ā A college graduates a student, not the other way around.ā
Iāve heard this complaint before, just not very often. It sure doesnāt rank anywhere near the top 10 most common gripes to hit my in-box. Still, I have gotten emails decrying this linguistic atrocity.
Now letās say, hypothetically speaking, that you want to know how to properly use āgraduate,ā but you donāt want to take a bunch of survey respondentsā words for it. What if you wanted to find out for yourself? Where would you turn?
Despite what the office grammar Nazi tells you, she isnāt an official source for grammar rules. A fuzzy memory of a long-ago rant from some elder relative or even a whip-cracking English teacher doesnāt count, either.
Whenever you want to know whether itās wrong to use such-and-such word in such-and-such way, your best bet is a dictionary, backed up with enough grammar savvy to know how to use it.
So, with a copy of Merriam-Websterās Collegiate in hand and a quick primer on verb forms, letās consider: Can you graduate college or must you graduate from college?
The difference between the two rests in the concept of transitive vs. intransitive verbs. A transitive verb takes a direct object, like āpunchedā in āEd punched Dan.ā Here we have a noun, Dan, that receives the action of the verb.
Compare that to the verb āarrivedā in āEd arrived.ā As in the first sentence, we have Ed acting as subject of the verb ā the person performing the action. But this time no oneās on the receiving end because thereās nothing to receive. Arriving is not something you do to someone or something else. Itās just something you do.
In our first sentence, Dan is functioning as something called a direct object, which takes no preposition. Compare āEd punched Danā with āEd yelled at Danā and āEd argued with Dan.ā The prepositions āatā and āwithā are clues that the verbs are not transitive. The verbs donāt act directly upon something. The prepositional phrase isnāt an object. Thatās just not its syntactical function. So the preposition actually changes the grammar.
That is the difference between āHe graduated collegeā and āHe graduated from college.ā The first has a transitive verb and ācollegeā is its direct object. The second has an intransitive verb, ornamented with a prepositional phrase.
The question of whether one can both graduate from college and graduate college rests on whether āgraduateā is a transitive verb, an intransitive verb or, like so many other verbs, both.
Care to guess? Itās both. And when you read the definitions under its transitive form, you see that the form people hate, the one without āfrom,ā is fine: ā2. to be graduated from.ā
If you read the entire dictionary entry, including the usage note, you learn something even more interesting. Todayās sticklers have it backward from the way things used to be. In the 19th century, the transitive was the only correct choice: āHe graduated collegeā was correct and āHe graduated from collegeā was wrong.
If youāre wondering about a third form, āThe school graduated him,ā in which the institution is the subject and the person is the object, thatās in there, too. And, you guessed it, itās also correct.
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JUNE CASAGRANDE is author of āThe Best Punctuation Book, Period.ā She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.