A Word, Please: ‘Graduate’ 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 “thank you” with “no problem” instead of “you’re welcome.”

Most of the real grammar peeves in the NPR list were issues we’ve already discussed in this column, like “literally” and “begs the question.” But of the top 10 most common gripes, No. 9 surprised me most: “Saying someone ‘graduated college’ instead of ‘graduated from college.’ A college graduates a student, not the other way around.”

I’ve heard this complaint before, just not very often. It sure doesn’t rank anywhere near the top 10 most common gripes to hit my in-box. Still, I have gotten emails decrying this linguistic atrocity.

Now let’s say, hypothetically speaking, that you want to know how to properly use “graduate,” but you don’t want to take a bunch of survey respondents’ 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 isn’t 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 doesn’t count, either.

Whenever you want to know whether it’s 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-Webster’s Collegiate in hand and a quick primer on verb forms, let’s 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 “punched” in “Ed punched Dan.” Here we have a noun, Dan, that receives the action of the verb.

Compare that to the verb “arrived” in “Ed arrived.” As in the first sentence, we have Ed acting as subject of the verb — the person performing the action. But this time no one’s on the receiving end because there’s nothing to receive. Arriving is not something you do to someone or something else. It’s just something you do.

In our first sentence, Dan is functioning as something called a direct object, which takes no preposition. Compare “Ed punched Dan” with “Ed yelled at Dan” and “Ed argued with Dan.” The prepositions “at” and “with” are clues that the verbs are not transitive. The verbs don’t act directly upon something. The prepositional phrase isn’t an object. That’s just not its syntactical function. So the preposition actually changes the grammar.

That is the difference between “He graduated college” and “He graduated from college.” The first has a transitive verb and “college” 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 “graduate” is a transitive verb, an intransitive verb or, like so many other verbs, both.

Care to guess? It’s both. And when you read the definitions under its transitive form, you see that the form people hate, the one without “from,” is fine: “2. to be graduated from.”

If you read the entire dictionary entry, including the usage note, you learn something even more interesting. Today’s sticklers have it backward from the way things used to be. In the 19th century, the transitive was the only correct choice: “He graduated college” was correct and “He graduated from college” was wrong.

If you’re wondering about a third form, “The school graduated him,” in which the institution is the subject and the person is the object, that’s in there, too. And, you guessed it, it’s also correct.

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JUNE CASAGRANDE is author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.