Ivy League
noun phrase

- a group of eight old, distinguished colleges and universities in the North Eastern U.S., known for their ivy-covered brick buildings

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PHRASE ORIGIN

Many people believe, incorrectly, that the name of this group of prestigious East Coast universities derives from an athletic league that originally had four members, the name coming from the Roman numeral IV.

Ivy League is originally a sportswriter’s term, but it has nothing to do with the number four. The term was first used in 1937 by the New York Herald-Tribune sportswriter Caswell Adams. He used it in reference to the unofficial conference of teams also known as the Old Ten.

The teams were Army, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Navy, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale. In 1940, Army and Navy dropped out of the association and the membership has remained the same ever since. The league was formalized in 1954 and played its first games as a formal organization in 1956.

Ivy League is the name now generally applied to eight universities (Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale) that over the years have had common interests in scholarship as well as in athletics.

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WISE WORDS ABOUT EDUCATION

(1)  “A man’s mind, stretched by new ideas, may never return to its original dimensions” — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

(2)  “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance” — Andy McIntyre

(3)  “Live as if you were to die tomorrow, learn as if you were to live forever” — Mahatma Gandhi

(4)  “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think” — Margaret Mead

(5)  “To teach is to learn twice” — Joseph Joubert

(6)  “Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another” — G.K. Chesterton

(7)  “The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled” — Plutarch
 
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SYNONYMS

- for education and learning

academic discipline, apprenticeship, breeding, coaching, cultivation, culture, development, discipline, edification, enlightenment, enrichment, erudition, grooming, grounding, guidance,  illumination, improvement, initiation, instruction, knowledge, learning, lesson, literacy, nurture, pedagogy, tuition,  tutelage, tutoring, upbringing, wisdom

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SMUGGLE OWAD into an English conversation, say something like:

“If IVY LEAGUE universities are to remain competitive, they’d do well to remember the words of the Greek historian Plutach, written almost 2,000 years ago.”

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