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How widely used is the term "co-ed" as a noun meaning "a female student"?
I'd have thought that in the U.S., at least, the term was archaic. Almost all schools in America now have male and female students.* I've never heard the term in conversation. However, in Korea, there is a mediocre K-pop group called "Co-Ed School," one of the few idol groups to have both males and females.
I first considered asking this question a week ago, when I'd hunted down an Erik Erikson quotation I'd remembered inexactly from having read it in 1970. It had stayed in my memory for a fundamentally different reason, the phrase "compared to what?," which relates to the psychosocial explorations of mine that I entitle "Relativism: So What?," and I'll give it its own entry one of these days. But I also remembered that it contained the term "co-ed," the word surprising me when I read it, and that's the word I used in the Web search that successfully tracked down the quote. I'd originally seen the passage in the Erikson collection Identity: Youth And Crisis, and in my memory I assumed the essay was from the late 1940s, the term "co-ed" dating it in my mind. Surprisingly, I see that the essay was based on a lecture that he gave in 1960. Although some prestige schools like Yale remained male-only until the late 1960s, I've assumed the term "co-ed" had been long moot by 1960, coeducation being so overwhelmingly common. Again, I don't recall ever hearing the word in conversation, and I grew up about a half mile from a college campus.
So last Wednesday, when Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a "slut" for advocating that her college include birth control in its health package, he started off, "What does it say about the college co-ed ... who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex?"
( YouTube searches )
I'd have thought that in the U.S., at least, the term was archaic. Almost all schools in America now have male and female students.* I've never heard the term in conversation. However, in Korea, there is a mediocre K-pop group called "Co-Ed School," one of the few idol groups to have both males and females.
I first considered asking this question a week ago, when I'd hunted down an Erik Erikson quotation I'd remembered inexactly from having read it in 1970. It had stayed in my memory for a fundamentally different reason, the phrase "compared to what?," which relates to the psychosocial explorations of mine that I entitle "Relativism: So What?," and I'll give it its own entry one of these days. But I also remembered that it contained the term "co-ed," the word surprising me when I read it, and that's the word I used in the Web search that successfully tracked down the quote. I'd originally seen the passage in the Erikson collection Identity: Youth And Crisis, and in my memory I assumed the essay was from the late 1940s, the term "co-ed" dating it in my mind. Surprisingly, I see that the essay was based on a lecture that he gave in 1960. Although some prestige schools like Yale remained male-only until the late 1960s, I've assumed the term "co-ed" had been long moot by 1960, coeducation being so overwhelmingly common. Again, I don't recall ever hearing the word in conversation, and I grew up about a half mile from a college campus.
So last Wednesday, when Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a "slut" for advocating that her college include birth control in its health package, he started off, "What does it say about the college co-ed ... who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex?"
( YouTube searches )
