Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This chapter is a commencement address the author gave to graduating law students. It deals with the words graduation, degree, and gray. Degree is simply ‘degrade’ in a Frenchified form. Just as commencements can mark a beginning as well as an end, so reflexes of Latin gradus (step) can indicate going down, going up, or being leveled out. Gradus plays an outside role in the punning and word games in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. So the author meant to give an anti-commencement address by pointing to the down as well as up sense of the degree the students were getting. This provides a fitting end in this book to the number of auto-antonyms that figured in many of the preceding chapters.</jats:p>