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

whether you should use the word alumni or the word alums.

A meaty middle about words from bookmaking and a tidbit about the phrase beyond the

pale.

And now onto our quick and dirty tip.

You'll remember that a couple of weeks ago I had a piece from Neil Whitman about homecoming

being called Hoco.

And Neil was also kind enough to point out that although I wrote about the words alum

and alumni in some of my Gramer Girl books, I've never covered them on the podcast or

on the website and this would be a good time of year to do so because alumni go to homecoming

or should that be alums go to homecoming.

Well, first let's deal with the singular forms.

As you may have guessed, these words to describe graduates come straight from Latin.

Alone female graduate is called an alumna.

So I'm an alumna of the University of Washington in Seattle and an alumna of Stanford University.

Alone male graduate is called an alumnus.

Alumnus means foster son, pupil or to nourish in Latin.

And the Latin term for a former school is Alma Mater, meaning nourishing mother.

So an alumnus can be seen as the foster son or pupil of the nourishing mother, the school.

Nice huh?

Now let's get to the plurals.

A group of male graduates are alumni and a group of female graduates are formally called

...