Coed
This one always irks me. A "coed" is a female student. There's no term for a male student, because male students are considered to be the norm. No news organization should ever use "coed" any more, but they do, routinely, especially in headlines. For example:
http://www.twincities.com/allheadlines/ci_11244963
Headline: "Parents of slain UW coed ask judge not to release 911 call"
Story: "Slain University of Wisconsin-Madison student Brittany Zimmermann would not have wanted her final moments broadcast publicly, her parents have written to a Dane County Circuit judge in a letter released Monday. "
The story itself uses "student,' but the headline uses "coed."
The argument will be that space is tight, but this doesn't seem to apply to racial epithets, some of which are much shorter than the correct terms.
http://www.twincities.com/allheadlines/ci_11244963
Headline: "Parents of slain UW coed ask judge not to release 911 call"
Story: "Slain University of Wisconsin-Madison student Brittany Zimmermann would not have wanted her final moments broadcast publicly, her parents have written to a Dane County Circuit judge in a letter released Monday. "
The story itself uses "student,' but the headline uses "coed."
The argument will be that space is tight, but this doesn't seem to apply to racial epithets, some of which are much shorter than the correct terms.
This is a US thing. I've never seen the word used anywhere else - certainly in Aus, the UK and NZ students are students.
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Thanks for the info -- I'm glad to hear it's not used elsewhere.
I checked a handy 2002 copy of the AP stylebook which didn't have any notes about it. So I got curious and searched the web. It did make it there, but not until October of 2007, according to http://www.newsroom101.com/NR_exercises/apupdates.html, which quotes:
"The preferred term as a noun is female student, but coed is acceptable as an adjective to describe coeducational institutions. No hyphen."
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THANK YOU! This has always irked me. I went to a women's college, and a remember a local news story referring to us as "coeds." The word is outdated and sexist.
In the case of headlines, "coed" is as lot more salacious, and therefore more likely to draw attention, than "student." Plus, it telegraphs that the victim is female--always more exciting in the world of news.
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I'm sure I'm misinformed here, but I always understood the term "coed" to be gender neutral. I've looked up the dictionary definition and see that it is female specific, but I don't understand HOW it is a female specific term. Coeducation is mixed sex education...it seems like the problem could be more easily solved by referring to students of both genders as coeds instead of trying to get rid of the term all together.
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"Coed" to describe a person is female-specific, because it dates to when the male-only schools began to accept women (women were hence called "coeds," because they were making the schools coeducational).
Also, in those days, women attending college was regarded as a novelty. Today, with male-only colleges a distant memory and women making up the majority of university students, the term is obsolete. Of course, there is still that lazy older man on the copy desk who doesn't know better when he writes a headline.
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THANK YOU! This has always irked me. I went to a women's college, and a remember a local news story referring to us as "coeds." The word is outdated and sexist.
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This is a US thing. I've never seen the word used anywhere else - certainly in Aus, the UK and NZ students are
students .
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I agree with Jon. Perhaps since there are now more WOMEN enrolled in US colleges, redefining the "norm", we should only refer to the men as coeds until the "perception scale" balances out..
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