Graduation is in the air, and also, appropriately for this column, mortarboards will be. I must thank my mother for inspiration, as it is to her hard work and dedication that I owe for the opportunity to don such headgear.

The mortarboard used by the bricklayer or the plasterer is a square board for holding masonry mortar, with a handle on the bottom. The mortarboard that robe-wearing college graduates and faculty members wear is, of course, “a close-fitting cap surmounted by a broader square of stiff cardboard or similar material, covered with black cloth and dressed with a tassel and worn as an article of formal academic headwear,” according to our old friend, the Oxford English Dictionary.

While mortarboard has been around in English since the middle of the 1700s, it did not make its first appearance as slang for the silly hat that we will be wearing on graduation day until 1854, in The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, an Oxford Freshman, by Cuthbert Bede, with the line: “‘I don’t mind this ‘ere mortar-board’… as he pointed to the academical cap.’” Both Mr. Bede (his real name being Edward Bradley) and his creation, the hapless scholar-in-training, Verdant Green, were characters in the truest sense.

Bradley (1827-1889) was a comically inclined English clergyman who wrote for the satirical magazine Punch and the Illustrated London News, among others, but is best known for writing (and, impressively, drawing) his stories about fictional Brazenface College, at the real-life University of Oxford and the “green” collegian who inhabited it.

Another early literary reference in the same vein comes to us from the impeccable Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942), from 1908, and her Anne of Green Gables, with this line: “Anne saw herself winning the … scholarship … and graduating in a gown and mortar-board.”

In the interest of comprehensiveness, two older synonyms for mortarboard include “catercap” and “trencher-cap.” The former refers to “the square cap worn by academics,” or to the “wearer of a catercap, a university man,” again according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It comes from the Old French “quatre,” from the Latin “quattuor,” meaning “four” (hence the four corners of the “catercap”).

The latter refers to a hat in the shape of an upside-down trencher, or a plate for food (made of wood, metal, or, in ye’ old medieval days, sometimes of bread; it was also an old synonym for a knife). The Oxford English Dictionary notes that it shares the same root word as “trench” and comes from the French “trancher,” meaning “to cut, hew, slice,” from the Latin “truncāre,” meaning “to cut or lop off,” from “truncus,” referring to a tree’s trunk.

So as you put on that mortarboard/catercap/trencher-cap, I hope you remember that you are wearing a bit of symbolically goofy slang. Remember, it is tradition. This is the last word of the quarter, as it were, but happily not forever, as there will be a summer edition of “Will’s Word.”

If you have any etymological ideas between now and then, however, please send them to me, and until next time, cheers! And Godspeed with graduation!

Reach columnist Will Mari at features@dailyuw.com.