A Twitter conversation yesterday turned on this headline at Philly.com: "Mother's in a panic because coed / daughter's hooking up." The conversation began with the comment "Haven't we all made a pact to stop using the word 'coed' yet?"
Coed for "female student" is one of those time capsule words, harking (not hearkening) back to the era when faculty graded on the A for athlete, B for boy, C for coed system. (Also in retro news, girls, stay clear of Tim Hunt's laboratory.) Some years ago the Associated Press Stylebook belatedly, as is its custom, advised against using coed except for institutions, but compliance is spotty.
This prompts me to reflect what you can expect in headline writing.* The practice of composing headlines has fractured, along with much else in current journalism.
It used to be possible for reporters to say, "It's not my fault. We don't write the headlines. Blame the copy desk." And indeed, publications once employed a corps of editors who specialized in the craft and conventions of headline writing, often resorting to vile headlinese to fit words into single-column spaces, but generally doing a responsible job of reflecting the sense of the article while maintaining whatever standards the publication purported to uphold.
No more. Copy editors in the wild are as scarce as northern hairy-nosed wombats.** The headlines you see online and even in print may well have been written, in haste, by people with little or no training or experience in the craft—by reporters, or editors, or designers, or random street people.
*Thanks to all of you who shared the "Amphibious pitcher makes debut" headline with me yesterday. It's the sort of trap we've all fallen into. The wrong word spelled right is the terror of editing.
**And we have no protective fence separating us from the dingoes.