The only comment I'll make

[prog]

Ugh. I can't believe this is an AP headline.

"MIT coed with fake bomb 'art' arrested"

Problems here:

• Co-ed is an outmoded term. I am pretty sure that the AP style guide explicitly stated this when I studied it over a decade ago. Do they make an exception for headlines? If so, what difference does it make what gender the person was?


• There was no fake bomb. It was a sweatshirt modified to have a light-up message, and by all accounts one that the person frequently wore. But every other headline is saying the same thing, and such was the best general knowledge in the first few moments after the arrest, so I can give this a reluctant pass. I'll be pissed if it sez this in tomorrow's print newspapers, though.


• I know that putting 'art' in quotes is ostensibly the headline writer saying that someone in the story is quoted as calling it art, but it ends up just sounding really snotty, as in my two year old kid could do that or whatever.

Comments

[ron_newman]

co-ed is appropriate only if you're describing the first or second entering class of a former single-sex school that just started admitting both genders. (Which obviously isn't MIT.)

[prog.livejournal.com]

Yes, and only in a context like "the first co-ed class in Furbrush University's 500-year history". Even then you wouldn't call an individual from that class a "co-ed".

I give a little bit of benefit-of-the-doubt to headline writers who are trained to do everything they can to conservice horizontal space, and "coed" is a narrower word than "student". But still.