[Bill Carpenter]

Agreed, Douglas. Grammar commenters judge the transitive usage illiterate. See, e.g, https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/ed...graduated-from
Arguing from experience, I first heard "graduated high school" in New Jersey.

[Allen Tice]

I think that there has been an identity theft of the Grammarfuss brand. I don't approve of those. This particular thread has it's own intrinsic interest, and I posted despite major misgivings. Whether one loved the proper Grammarfuss's search for niceties of nuance or not, the proper Grammarfuss has shown commendable restraint in watching (no doubt goggle-eyed) the proceedings. He deserves a kudo with umami, or maybe a kudo and a half. Or maybe, we others should join with him in a collective of Grammarfussters, just so long as he is in the loop. What say he?

[Kevin Rainbow]

By definition, the act of graduating is something a school does to a student, not something a student does to a school

Not a very intelligent way to try to make a case here. This person doesn't seem to understand that transitive usages are fully capable of having more than one meaning and that a meaning can imply "from". Narrowmindedness and (often selectively) short attention spans are more of a problem than words developing broader usages.

[Kevin Rainbow]

We do the same thing with the verb depart:

He departed from the city

He departed the city.

[Ann Drysdale]

Kevin, that's because people people are using bigger words where little ones could better be. The words "departed" and "left" are not synonymous, but in your example the simple word has been superseded by the more "refined" one, which has lost its preposition in the process.

Allen, I refer you to posts #4 and #20. You are not alone.

[Jim Moonan]

x
Ann: "Glasses are being chinked and waggled all over the shop, toasts scraped and buttered, but to what are we drinking? To the demise of the old Doctor or to the emergence of the new? Has he been superseded or regenerated? Who knows."

Oh me oh my. Chinked for clinked and toast for drink. Long live regeneration! Let's get to the top of this, Ms. I'll sup a side of Ann and a dollop of Allen and save some room for a piece of mind. The graduation goes on and on and on and on.
x

[Allen Tice]

Thank you, Ann. It’s good to ventilate in unison with colleagues who wear seven-league boots. At university, I had a close friend that had a little maths in the wheelhouse, who studied a paper-and-pencil psychological sentence-completion test of “ego development” — as it was assessed by sophisticated, trained evaluators — and found that the judged levels of “ego development” correlated stinkingly well with the logarithm of the written syllable-count of the answers — better than with word count or even letter count. Gosh, that's actually pretty neat!

Obviously, it was not a Freudian ego that was being charted, but the windbag ego that swells with wisdom. It’s just that everybody's upping their personal brand by padding with longer phrases in the climb for status. High “ego development”, thesaurus-rich, sentences like the first two sentences of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” were privileged, low “ego development” efforts like poor Aram Saroyan’s “lighght" were dealt disrespect. Haiku might fall in some middle bin. So people want a top kudos evaluation for “departed from” instead of the monosyllabic “fled.” Golly.

[Michael Cantor]

Hey, guys - and particularly Douglas Brown - Dr. Grammarfuss was introduced to the Sphere by Mike Juster in 2012, and since then our history shows 16 Dr. Grammarfuss threads (sometimes Mister Grammarfuss) - all started by Mike, and now one started by Douglas Brown.

I checked to see whether Grammarfuss was a common expression, and it isn't. My impression is that Mike coined it. Why don't we leave it with Mike, Douglas, ignore Mike's generous offer in Post #4, and find yourself another word. Alternately, Mike could license the use of the word to you.

[Allen Tice]

Re Post number 4: https://sonnet-40-take-all-my-loves-my-love-yea-take-them-all.

I'm singing the music from your page, Cantor, but there's also the public multiple personality "Jethro Tull" option, where any Spherean could become a Grammarfuss.

[Bill Carpenter]

Maybe Douglas' initial post is less a usurpation than a humble petition for advice from the veritable Grammarfuss absconditus.