Recently I heard a public radio podcast by Sandra Tsing Loh in which she discusses her daughter’s fifth-grade graduation–er, excuse me–culmination. Now as much as anyone, I think overblown pre-secondary graduations, with little cap-and-gowns outfits and “Pomp-and-Circumstance” processionals are as ridiculous as argyle socks on the tiny vestigial leg osf a 35-foot python. But otherwise why not observe and acknowledge the time of passage for the kids; after all, going on to middle school is a pretty big thing to the kids.
When I was a kid the schools here were K6-3-3 so my first “culmination” was in 1969, and even then, the teachers and principals went to great pains to point out that it wasn’t a graduation, but a culmination, just as Sandra Loh emphasizes the word in her podcast. But why is this distinction so important? At my culmination the class got up and sang some songs from musicals. A couple of the more creative ones got to perform by themselves; one kid played a piano solo he had written and a couple of others sang “Those Were The Days” as one of them played his guitar. Except for those three I wouldn’t say it was a “culminating experience” by any definition. The class before us performed The Mikado, which, though replete with songs that no sixth-grader should be expected to like, sounded a lot more interesting than lining up in three rows to sing “Do-Re-Mi” and “Singing In The Rain”. Maybe you could call that a culminating experience, I don’t know. As I’ve seen it otherwise used, though, a culminating experience is a major project you have to complete as part of the requirements for a degree, and that doesn’t really seem to fit the definition of a ceremony for kids finishing elementary school.
Why was/is it so important to say culmination instead of graduation?
Bonus question on a related note: I remember my teachers in the primary grades would never say one of the class was out sick; instead they were always out because they were ill. It’s not that we don’t use the word ill; it’s just that the connotation is substantially different. It tends to be general or figurative, as in “illness and misfortune”, or “Things were going ill for him”. Otherwise, apart from UK-produced film and fiction–and, of course–Miss Mosier, Miss Bell, and Miss Doll–I’ve never heard anyone use the word “ill” to mean “sick”, as with a cold or the chicken pox.
It wasn’t like the teachers would punish or correct anyone for saying “sick”, but the way they said “ill” was always so emphatic. Do they still do that?
“Culmination” does seem more accurate than “graduation”. “Graduation” implies to me that some sort of test or assessment has been passed, and perhaps some sort of diploma or other certificate awarded. If, as you say, “culmination” was the term used when you were that age, I don’t really understand why you have a problem with it.
As for “ill”, well, I don’t know why your teachers preferred it. In British English, “ill” is the normal, correct word, whereas “sick” means vomit (as a noun - or to “feel sick” is to feel like one is going to vomit). I have always been under the impression, though, that in American English “sick” was the correct word for what we Brits call “ill” (and that “ill” was understood, but rarely used). I wonder, though, if perhaps this is a relatively recent change in American English away from the British usage, and your teachers were hypercorrecting (as schoolteachers are wont to do) back to an older form that they thought of as more “correct” and less colloquial.
Huh, my fifth-grade teacher used to talk about people being “out ill,” which I found incredibly annoying without really knowing why. I haven’t thought about that for twenty-five years.
Anyway, I agree with the hyper-correction theory – it is fairly common, in my experience, for people to take it into their head that a less commonly-used word is somehow “better” than the idiomatic, conversational alternative.
I don’t remember ever hearing “culmination” used in this context. But I think the word “graduation” refers to the conferring of an academic degree. No degree, no “graduation.”
Never heard it called “culmination”, ever, and using that seems even less appropriate than graduation. Culmination means the highest point, and you don’t reach that after fifth grade or middle school, since you’re staying in the school district.
Around here, they are called “promotion ceremonies”*, which seems accurate.
except Kindergarten graduation. (They’re in kindergarten. Let them have their day.)
I think '“ill” is more formal ( I might say a coworker was “out sick” the last week but if I’m writing a memo and my only choices are sick or ill, I’m using ill) , but I also think that the American use of “sick” is not that far from the British use. Sure, we use it to mean more than just vomiting or nausea, but it’s mostly short-term conditions like chicken pox or the flu. I don’t often hear someone with cancer referred to as being “sick” , it’s almost always “ill”.
In a similar context, “sick” or “to feel or be sick” is widely used and understood the same way in AmE, notwithstanding its wider meaning “to be suffering from a disease”. I wonder now if the teachers’ preference for “ill” was merely a matter of prescriptive usage, or rather based on a more general grammatical principal what with “sick” being an adjective and “ill” an adverb.
I had a teacher in elementary school (I forget which teacher) who said to use “ill” to mean when someone wasn’t feeling well, because “sick” meant messed up mentally/sick in the head. So when she was doing roll call, and she called a student’s name and another student said that the first student wasn’t there because he was “sick”, the teacher would always correct the student and say, “You mean ‘ill’.”
On a tree by a willow a little tom-tit
sang willow, tit-willow, tit-willow…
and I said to him Dicky bird why do you sit?
singing willow, tit-willow, tit-willow…
This is just my opinion, but I really detest pretentious wankers - even though I suspect I probably project that image myself. But like any good psychopath, I don’t feel like I can be compared to other pretentious wankers since I have good reasons for what I do - that would be as opposed to bullshit nonsense reasons. [:rolleyes:]
If you’re going to waste time even wondering if there might be a distinction worth making here, I think that you need to find other things that might actually be worth thinking about.
Now since I have zero social skills and always have to consider the possibility that something might just be an extremely dry joke . . . well if so, well done. That’s actually pretty funny. If not, I can still see how it can be fun to delve into the etymology of words, look at their various nuanced meanings, how they’ve evolved, etc. That’s quite fascinating and a great deal more valuable of an exercise than it might appear.
But if anyone is anyway serious about this . . . Dude . . . [shakes head]
When I was a kid, back in the 50s-60s, K-6 was Elementary School. There was no ceremony at all, or at least none that I can remember. Then it got confusing. 7-8 was Junior High, and 9-12 was High School. But Ninth Grade, although technically part of High School, was still in the Junior High building. Then, beginning in 10th grade, we were actually in the High School. So our Junior High graduation was at the end of 9th grade.
At the beginning of 9th grade, it was made very clear to us that everything went on our “Permanent Record,” though nobody knew exactly what that meant.
I think you are on the right path. I see the term “graduation” as potentially implying that a major milestone has been reached and a specific credential has been awarded. Do they award 5th grade diplomas with a GPA and honors where you can actually go out and do something meaningful with them? Can a 7th grader be caught in an audit as a cheater or plagiarizer (they so copied that book report off of their big sister) and retroactively have their 5th grade diploma revoked? What would happen in such a case? Would they get demoted to 5th grade? I can’t see that happening in any meaningful sense - the student would just go on, possibly with a lower GPA if elementary school grades are averaged in (though I never saw a case where this was actually the case, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a K-12 integrated school where they did a cumulative GPA for all of your years).
To this American, the term “ill” can imply general queasiness or “feeling sick” in a general sense such as having a headache or nausea. “Sick” implies that one has a specific diagnosable medical condition that would be recognized by a doctor. If you had a headache due to stress, lack of sleep, and too much caffeine use, that might make you “ill” but not “sick” because if you went to a doctor, the doctor would be unlikely to diagnose you with any specific medical disorder (e.g. chronic migraine headaches, bipolar I, or rectal cancer) and would just tell you to relax, get some rest, and lay off the coffee.
I saw a performance of The Mikado where the “three little maids from school” were clearly played by adult actresses. Perhaps having real schoolgirls in the roles might be more immersive. If public schools are as liberal as I’ve heard some of them are, the “three little maids from school” might be played by boys.
Oddly, I don’t remember anyone at the school telling me this, but my parents did. Like you we had the K6 -3 -3 scheme, and apart from the the fact that our GPAs now counted toward college admission, we thought of ourselves as seniors in the school, rather than high schoolers in a separate building from where the rest of them went. Come to think of it, it was possibly because of the K6-3-3 thing that we almost never used the names of years (e.g. sophomore or junior). We simply called it “1th grade” or “11th grade” and so on.
Weird, that. It’s as if we might have called one’s senior year in college the 16th grade.
On diction questions such as this, I take a pragmatic approach. Is graduation ambiguous? Does it have some other important usage which (notwithstanding context) will cause the reader (or listener) to pause, trying to puzzle out which meaning is intended? If not, I use the conventional term regardless of whether it is, in some technical sense not quite the right word. Here it’s easy, as culmination is the word that will make the reader (or listener) pause, and perhaps even have to reach for a dictionary. Whereas graduation will be immediately understood. Use that.