Gramer Girl here. I'm Minion Fogarty and this week I have a quick and dirty tip about commencement.

A meeting middle about how often you can delete the word it and a featured listener.

And now let's talk about why the celebration at the end of college or high school is called

commencement, which sounds like it should be a beginning.

Last week a professor in my department asked me why we call a graduation ceremony commencement

when the event marks the end of college. To commence means to begin, not end, so it seems

like an odd name for the ceremony. I thought it was a great question and I didn't have an

answer so I did some research. Some sources say we call it commencement because it marks the

beginning of students' new lives in the world, the beginning of their professional lives.

But other sources take a more historical approach and say that in medieval times a student

entered the university as an apprentice and at the end of that period commenced as a university

master or doctor. For example, the book The Founding of Harvard College explains that a person

needed a license to lecture and just as many other trades at the time teachers formed a guild.

Under graduates today are the intellectual descendants of those apprentice members of the

teachers guild who were working to get a teaching license. Once they received a license they were

initiated into this master's of arts guild through a ceremony called commencement. They were

beginning their careers as master's of arts. They were being initiated as teachers.

And the word commencement isn't the only thing we've kept in graduation ceremonies from medieval

times. Medieval scholars at universities such as Oxford and Cambridge also wore caps, gowns,

and hoods similar to those that graduates wear today. And that was your quick and dirty tip.

We call graduation ceremonies commencement because in the past they marked the beginning of a

person's career as a master of arts at the university. In other words, the beginning of a person's

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