Long ago I heard the word to “matriculate” and really loved the sound of it, especially in context with the meaning, at least the one I was told back then.
Basically matriculated meant, to me, that I’d passed a certain level of achievement, high school grad and then matriculated to college - or college grad matriculating into a post grad position. A matter of arriving and moving on.
Turns out the definitions I’ve read past few years all agree that matriculated means:
“to be enrolled at …”.
It’s so deflating, then when I look up the thesaurus to find something for “graduate” every suggestion is boring to silly. Which makes me feel like mourning the loss of word that never was, but should have been.
Why waste such a beautiful word on something so mundane - to enroll 
- when the big deal is having achieved a certain level of knowledge and competence that raises one to a new level of achievement/challenge.
Help, dog chasing tail, not making any progress . . .
