Graduating Teachers, Teaching Graduates - Lingua Franca - The ...

As we approach the annual rites, the degree of dudgeon rises again. Obama may say it; Barbara Walters may say it; our beloved children, on whom we have showered more than half our income annually over four years of university education, may crow it, but we as a nation of tut-tutters get the heebie-jeebies when we hear it: She graduated college. ?I immediately went to the bathroom to be sick,? wrote one online commenter about hearing the term on a news broadcast. Another suggested that one can graduate college only by measuring it out as portions, as in the OED?s 1834 example, ?Graduate that tangent, and place the crest of the traverse on a parallel plane ten feet above it.?

True, that august reference tool does not use the verb ?to graduate? transitively except as the obverse of the usage to which the tut-tutters object. That is, Oxford can graduate you, and you can be graduated by Oxford, but not the reverse. The intransitive sense, of which the tut-tutters heartily approve, arises in the 19^th century, chiefly in the United States, as students began graduating from an institution rather than having the institution graduate them. This shift may say something about our famous self-reliance, also known as our tendency to take individual credit for everything?but let?s move on. What fascinates me about the whole debate is that, although the OED does not include the usage that nauseates the commentariat, Merriam-Webster does, with this note:

In the 19th century the transitive sense (1a [to grant an academic degree to]) was prescribed; the intransitive <I graduated from college> was condemned. The intransitive prevailed nonetheless, and today it is the sense likely to be prescribed and the newer transitive sense (1b) <she graduated high school> the one condemned. All three are standard. The intransitive is currently the most common, the new transitive the least common.

In other words, what nauseates this generation will be venerated by the next. Surely the same holds true for many of these idioms. I teach college, another locution that sends some listeners to their air-sickness bags, is likewise vulnerable to mockery. Just as the effete may wish us to imagine a student dividing an institution into portions, so they may wish us to imagine a hapless professor lecturing that institution, squeezed into a seminar chair. Martin Amis, in The Information, allows his chronically enraged narrator to mock a rival?s attitude in much the same way:

Hey, Gwyn. You know what you remind me of? A quiz in a color magazine?you know, Are You Cut Out to Be a Teacher? Final question: Would you rather teach (a) history, (b) geography, or (c) ?children. Well, you don?t get a choice about teaching children.

Of course, the object of the verb to teach could easily be answering the question ?Whom?? or ?What?? or ?Students at what level???and the answers students (or in Amis?s example, children), history, and college would all be appropriate.

So it is, I think, with graduated. For four years, students have been attending. Where have they been attending? College. What have they been attending? Classes. Intransitively, we hope, they have been attending to their work. They are now graduating. Where are they graduating? College. What is graduating them? College. Intransitively, from what are they graduating? College.

But pointing out these histories of a particular usage, like pointing out the elisions that make meaning implicit, probably won?t help the tut-tutters. ?Seems like this one is along the lines of? ?peed my pants,?? wrote one disgruntled grammarian, ?which everyone likes to say these days, instead of ?peed in my pants.? It drives me crazy?the constant dumbing down of American English.?

Gee. Somehow, I hadn?t thought of it that way.

Source: http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/05/03/graduating-teachers-teaching-graduates/

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