Trivia time. At least it’s trivia I did not know. Nothing to do with writing.
I have always wondered why, when you earn a privilege, you do not take advantage of it?
This occurred to me last week when my son received his master’s degree. They graduated the students according to the level of their degree. The doctoral students, those earning a PhD., went first, followed by the master degree recipients, then the bachelor degree students.
As the doctoral students came up to receive their diploma, each was hooded. It is a real hood, sort of a KKK thing going on there. But it is draped over the student more like a stole. I did not realize it was an actual hood until my grandson was playing with it later. Most of the doctoral students wore the traditional mortarboard, similar to their bachelor’s and master’s classmates. About a third of them chose to wear what I referred to as the felt pillow hat. What was signified by the difference in hats?
“Nothing,” my son told me later over dinner. “The doctoral students choose which hat they want to wear.”
My curiosity was piqued.
I looked it up in Wikipedia. The felt pillow hat is called an English tudor cap, or more commonly a tam. Tam is also an abbrveviated way to refer to a tam o’ Shanter, which is a traditional Scottish cap. Whereas the tam o’ Shanter is usually plaid, a doctoral tam is typically a solid color.
In academia the tam traditionally signifies the wearer as the recipient of a doctoral degree. Which hat the students wear is a matter of tradition at the school. Some schools urge all doctoral candidates to wear a tam. They earned the right. In other institutions the tradition is not as stringent. In some schools the tradition is not that strong.
I suspect the tradition is dictated by faculty. All of the faculty wore the tam. There were a few different styles, too. Some of the tams were four-corned. Others had six corners and some even had eight. There is also a round tam, closer in style to the traditional English tudor cap. Some had more body and shape than others. As far as I can tell, there is no difference signified by how many corners. I would guess that some of the tams are handed down from parent to child
Of course, all the tams have a tassel like the mortarboards. All the tassels are flipped to the left in a joint movement at the conclusion of the graduation.
There, all you needed to know about tams. When you write about them, you will know.
See ya’ later.
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