Bruce Despain asked an interesting question:
"Perhaps the compound noun "high school graduation," where "high school"
becomes part of the noun, but seems to retain an object relationship, can
motivate a back-formation so that "high school" could be reanalyzed and
used as an (included) direct object of the verb "graduate."  Craig's
example points to a certain awkwardness in saying "graduate it."  "?John
went to Fremont High School, but his father graduated it." Is it
coincidental that an included object shows just such an aversion to being
pronominalized?"

A piece of the data that I cited in my previous posting may explain why
"graduated it" in the example sentence is not good.  The "it" refers to a
specific high school and not to high school as a level of education.  Let
me reproduce the relevant piece of data:

A whole series of bios from Access TECH webpage use the form "graduated
high school."  Most of the bios on this page use the structure…except for
a few that specify the name of the high school and then the structure is
“graduated from X high school.”

"I grew up in Austin, Texas and I graduated high school from Austin High.
I received my Bachelor of Science in Human Development and Family Studies
and will be receiving my Master of Education in Higher Education in
December of 2004."

Even in this one, the name of the high school is specified and functions
as the object of the preposition "from."  I would be interested to know
whether people have seen examples like "He graduated Harrisonburg High
School in 1989."

By the way, I checked the M-W Dictionary of English Usage and the entry
there for "graduate" helps to put this whole discussion in a very
interesting context.  The prior "battle" over the usage of "graduate" had
to do with the insistence of some purists that the correct form is "was
graduated from."  In other words, "graduate" was considered a transitive
verb that should be used in the passive.  This usage dates back to the
16th century.  However, gradually the verb turned intransitive, to the
point where some handbooks published in the 70s called the usage "was
graduated" old-fashioned sounding and recommended "graduated" instead.

MWDEU goes on to say that the usage "graduated high school" first began to
be censured in the 1950s.  MWDEU cites several published examples of
edited English (in contrast to my unedited Internet examples) that used
this form, but then comments that it is much less frequent than "graduated
from high school."  Given the fact that in my Google search "graduated
high school" constitutes about 1/3 of the total instances of both usages,
we might conclude that either MWDEU underestimates the frequency of
"graduated high school" or its popularity has grown since the publication
of MWDEU 12 years ago.


R. Michael Medley, Ph.D., Director
Intensive English Program
Eastern Mennonite University, Harrisonburg, VA 22802
[log in to unmask]  (540) 432-4051

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