Pluralities of university graduates

Posted on Jul 21, 2009 in Language | 2 comments

Alumna is not a misspelling. Who knew?

My wife has a sweatshirt from the college she attended, an all-women’s school in Minnesota. Emblazoned across the front below the school’s name is the word “ALUMNA.”

That word always bugged me; I thought it was a misspelling of the word “alumnae,” which I believed was the correct term for a single female university or college graduate. Working in a registrar’s office, terms for graduates comes up fairly often and one day I mentioned this sweatshirt and the annoyance it caused me.

“You’d think an all-women’s college would know better,” I said, wrapping up my tale. Instead of the expected vitriol against the heavy cotton offender, I got a strange look. “They do know better… ‘alumna’ is correct.”

Since I’m not one to argue with my boss—especially when that boss studied medieval English, Greek and Lating—I paid attention. After my schooling, here’s how it breaks down:

Sure, it’s got that good ol’ sexist traditional method of defaulting to the male group term in any mixed group (99 female graduates and one male would still be called “alumni”), but hey—if people today use the term “guys” to refer to mixed group (or even an all-female one), we can’t get to upset over Latin traditions.

Perhaps soon we’ll just all wear sweaters with “ALUM” across the front and be done with it?

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