Any sociolinguists in the house?

[saxikath]

In the "Ask Dr. LJ" vein: Is there a geographical pattern to whether people say "I graduated school" or "I graduated from school," and if so, what is it?

Comments

[bunyip.livejournal.com]

For me, it's the latter choice.

[kayre]

It's definitely "graduated from" in my parts of the Midwest-- Indiana, Michigan, Ohio.

[navrins]

"Graduated from" everywhere I know of (mostly northeast US). Possibly it's a British thing?

Though it feels slightly more acceptable at higher levels - that is, "graduated law school" sounds more acceptable than "graduated MIT" or "graduated kindergarten," though less than "graduated cylinder."

[rishikanta.livejournal.com]

there goes my gleeful little thought that it follows the 'soda'/'pop' geographic demarkation ;)

[(Anonymous)]

Brian and I (from SC/GA/FL) use the "from"; the fromless version sounds alien to both of us.

-- Trip

Geography link

[yandros.livejournal.com]

Find yourself a Canadian, and see?

Or, you could always dig through this: http://www3.uwm.edu/Dept/FLL/linguistics/survey/

Re: Geography link

[saxikath]

Been there; this wasn't one of their questions, alas. I do love that survey, though.

[alaria-lyon.livejournal.com]

"I graduated school" definitely sounds British to me, where they "Go to University" and "Go to Hospital". I've never heard it in the US, but would bet if you're going to it would be in the regions where the dialects have British influence, such as some of the Northeast dialects. And in the case you have above, I believe that School would be capitalized in the first example, and lower case in the second.

[acroarcs.livejournal.com]

I'm going to second everyone who's saying it's a British thing - I've never heard one American (from anywhere) say it, but it was all over the recruiting materials my company had me go through to adapt from the British to the American labo(u)r market.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

I'm going to utterly disagree with everyone who says it's British, and point to this as the problem with using intuitions about dialects that aren't one's native dialect. ("It sounds British to me" is about the equivalent of a Jewish college freshman, in response to a question about whether a particular line in Piers Plowman is quoting Jesus in one of the Gospels, saying "It sounds like something Jesus would say." Which, I should note, happened when I took Survey of English Lit as a sophomore.)

Googling "graduated Oxford" gets 442 hits; "graduated Harvard" gets literally twice as many. (Some hits in both are irrelevant, i.e. have a comma after "graduated".) The OED doesn't note the usage at all, which certainly suggests that it's not a long-established British usage. Nor, skimming a few hundred uses of "graduate" or "graduated" in citations in the OED, do I see a single instance of this usage. (A few examples with a degree--"educated at St. John's College, Oxford, graduated B.A...in 1847"--but that's definitely different.)

In fact, I think this is something else entirely, based on pages such as this usage discussion from Random House (which includes, I am annoyed to note, "Brown graduated John, even though he never took a serious course in four years"--why exactly is Brown used as the college that grants frivolous degrees?). Namely: the original use of "graduate" was transitive, with the university as subject and student as object, as in the example given parenthetically above. Over time, it became intransitive, with the student as subject: "John graduated, having worked hard for four years at Brown."

Using it transitively, with the school as the object ("John graduated Brown, having worked hard...") is, I think, simple hypercorrection. It's probably influenced by exactly what previous commenters observed--i.e. that Americans think that it's all Proper and British to leave out words like that--and by people hypercorrecting because they heard at some point that "graduate" should be transitive.