{"id":198,"date":"2014-03-15T19:51:26","date_gmt":"2014-03-15T19:51:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.ackgame.com\/onwords\/?p=198"},"modified":"2014-03-15T20:40:49","modified_gmt":"2014-03-15T20:40:49","slug":"alumni-not-really","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.ackgame.com\/onwords\/alumni-not-really\/","title":{"rendered":"Alumni? Not really"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><center><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.ackgame.com\/onwords\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/alumni.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-202\" alt=\"alumni\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.ackgame.com\/onwords\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/alumni.png\" width=\"262\" height=\"181\" \/><\/a><\/center>For all of you out there feeling the need for a Latin lesson, here&#8217;s one for you. My wife graduated from Stanford and I got my law degree from Cal Berkeley &#8211; arch rivals. Her car has a Stanford license plate holder on it and mine has a University of California Berkeley holder on it. Neither of these say &#8220;alumni.&#8221; Why not? Because we aren&#8217;t alumni of these schools. Actually, as stated in that last sentence, we probably are, but we certainly are not alumni of either school. I am an alumnus of Berkeley and she is an alumna of Stanford. Yet the makers of license plate holders are apparently not Latin scholars. This is a bit surprising to me since I always wondered what else someone with a degree in Latin or Classics could do for a living. So why do all the license plate holders, and for that matter, associations for graduates, use the term &#8220;alumni&#8221;? Simple: &#8220;alumni&#8221; is the plural masculine form of the word. It also includes any group (i.e. more than one person) if at least one is male.<\/p>\n<p>So &#8220;Alumni Association&#8221; is a proper term unless all the alums are women, in which case it should be &#8220;Alumnae Association&#8221;. By now you&#8217;re rolling your eyes and wondering why anyone cares. I&#8217;m not suggesting you should, but my wife and I were in the same Latin class in junior high school for two years. We&#8217;re both appreciative of the refinements and subtlety of language, so it just grates on us to display publicly something ungrammatical. This blog is called OnWords, after all. Maybe there&#8217;s also a touch of school rivalry in there. If either of us had an &#8220;alumni&#8221; plate, its plural nature would suggest that we were <em>both<\/em> graduates of the school mentioned. So below is an easy-reference chart. Note that the top labels (Male\/Female) refer to the <em>sex<\/em> of the people being described, not the <em>gender<\/em> of the words in that column. See my very first post in this blog: <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.ackgame.com\/onwords\/?p=14\"><em>People have sex<\/em><\/a> (and words have gender).<\/p>\n<p><center><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.ackgame.com\/onwords\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/Alumchart.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-200\" alt=\"Alumchart\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.ackgame.com\/onwords\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/Alumchart-500x114.png\" width=\"500\" height=\"114\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blog.ackgame.com\/onwords\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/Alumchart-500x114.png 500w, https:\/\/blog.ackgame.com\/onwords\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/Alumchart.png 554w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/a><\/center><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For all of you out there feeling the need for a Latin lesson, here&#8217;s one for you. My wife graduated from Stanford and I got my law degree from Cal Berkeley &#8211; arch rivals. Her car has a Stanford license plate holder on it and mine has a University of California Berkeley holder on it. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Alumni? 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