Gramer Girl here, I'm Mignon Fokerti and you can think of me as your friendly guide to

the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and cool stuff. Today, we'll

talk about graduated versus graduated from, and about six bona fide Latin phrases you

might find interesting and useful.

As it's graduation season, my social media feeds are filling up again with complaints

about people who say things such as, we are so proud of Jimmy, he graduated high school

this year. For example, Bill T wrote, do you graduate high school, or do you graduate

from high school? I don't think one can actually graduate a high school. Some trick to do

that. This has really bugged me, please advise.

Well, I covered the topic a few years ago, but I've had a bit of a change of heart since

then. If you want me to just tell you what to do to be safe, I still have to say stick

with graduated from. But I don't feel as strongly about it anymore, and it's an interesting

topic to explore. If you look back 80 years or so, you'll find that the verb graduated

used to be used differently, and current trends tell us that now it's being used differently

again. Language changes over time and graduated seems to be a twitchy verb that's always

on the move. First, let's travel back in time. In the late 1800s, conventional wisdom

said that a school did the act of graduating students. So the proper way to use graduated

was to say that Johnny was graduated from high school. That passive wording was graduated

from was considered standard English. But even then, people were already saying simply

Johnny graduated from high school. The usage guides admonished against it because people

were doing it. And then by 1963, the fourth edition of HL Menkins book The American Language

said that the active form had triumphed over the passive form because of the American drive

...