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Tragic: College co-ed killed in hostage situation.

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G

gturner

Admiral
Daily Mail link

A co-ed at Hofstra University (near New York City) was taken hostage by a thug on parole (long list of priors) who wanted the rob the college kids. Not satisfied with the cash on hand, the thug sends one of the students out to an ATM. The student notifies the police, the police storm the house and kill the thug, but accidentally shoot the hostage in the head, killing her, too.

Obviously things went very wrong.
 
OMG, yes, very wrong!

(Off topic, but a response to your language... It's been decades since most colleges became co-educational, and by now there are more women attending college than men. It's time to stop referring to female students as co-eds, as though male students are the norm.)
 
My college-age house mates (a couple of years ago) were still calling them "dames!" :eek:

I'm having trouble finding a synonym for coed. I don't think there is one.
 
A male student or a female student? By historical accident, we happened to coin a word for female undergraduate college students, and it only has two syllables! (New two-syllable English words are extremely hard to come by since the rights to most of them were bought up by URL speculators during the great dictionary boom of 1832.)

If we get too picky about where our handy, common words come from, we'd have to go to productions of "The Roman-Sword-Sheath-Synonym Monologues" and sit uncomfortably through "Civil War Rifle Barrel Plug Synonym" commercials. If it's not used as a derisive epithet, it's probably okay, which is why news media commonly use "coed" in their headlines (only taking up four letters).
 
Yes but if it was a male student that was killed in the hostage situation what word would the media have used in place of "co-ed", "student" perhaps, which I think was Ziyal's point.
 
Well, okay, I'll concede and go with the politically correct term "Female Undergraduate College Student" or the more informal "Female Undergraduate College Kids" like most of the more enlightened college-age folks do these days, usually as an acronym accompanied by an expression of concern for their temperature, hydration, and blood alcohol level.

(You know you're on a college campus when a girl gets accidentally shot in the head by a cop and the concern is for the proper gender-neutral term for her status at the university).
 
says the person who felt the need to lower it to rude acronyms

how is saying 'female student' a radical or somehow bewildering concept to understand?
 
junxon said:
says the person who felt the need to lower it to rude acronyms

how is saying 'female student' a radical or somehow bewildering concept to understand?
Click to expand...

I don't know. Why don't you fire off an angry letter to all the mainstream media editors pulling down six or seven-figure salaries in the most politically-correct, verbally picky field there is, who used "coed" in their headlines like it was the commonly accepted term or something.

Heck, maybe it took two or three extra hours for the police investigators to figure out what happened because they were all just standing over the rapidly cooling corpse arguing over the proper term to describe the victim in their police report. Is she a coed? A sorority girl? A sorority sister? A sorority person? A female member of a sorority? A female member of a Greek campus organization? A bi-boobied former female with an extra hole in her head?
 
gturner said:
My college-age house mates (a couple of years ago) were still calling them "dames!" :eek:

I'm having trouble finding a synonym for coed. I don't think there is one.
Click to expand...

Please tell me you're joking! The synonym is female student. Or just plain student. What's so complicated about that?

gturner said:
Why don't you fire off an angry letter to all the mainstream media editors pulling down six or seven-figure salaries in the most politically-correct, verbally picky field there is, who used "coed" in their headlines like it was the commonly accepted term or something.
Click to expand...

How 'bout because every mainstream media article I've read so far refers to her as a student or a female student or a female hostage? That's why your use of co-ed jumped out at me.

The more you write on this topic, the sillier you sound. Like Kestrel said, get a grip.
 
Would you like to know how many headlines use "coed killed" according to Google? It's a whole, whole lot. Here are a few examples.

Mother Of ECU Coed Killed In Wreck Sues Sorority

Teenager Arrested After Texas College Coed Killed

USC Coed Stabbed

Yes, even the LA Times uses "coed" in their headlines. It's a handy word.

However, that isn't at all what I thought might be discussed in this thread. I figured people would wonder whether the police were much too aggressive, and whether the policemen who ran into a house with an ongoing, known, multiple hostage situation was a testosterone fueled disaster waiting to happen. Even as he was heading in, another policemen was heard calling for decisions and support from higher up as to how to handle the situation, which turned out to be too late to stop what happened.

It's sad that the policeman will probably be reliving this incident for the rest of his life, but I'm pretty sure they tell police to never go charging into a hostage situation with guns blazing, and to wait for backup, negotiators, etc unless the perpetrator is actively shooting people.
 
Up until today I thought that co-ed referred to both male and female students. It all makes sense now.
 
gturner said:
junxon said:
says the person who felt the need to lower it to rude acronyms

how is saying 'female student' a radical or somehow bewildering concept to understand?
Click to expand...

I don't know. Why don't you fire off an angry letter to all the mainstream media editors pulling down six or seven-figure salaries in the most politically-correct, verbally picky field there is, who used "coed" in their headlines like it was the commonly accepted term or something.

Heck, maybe it took two or three extra hours for the police investigators to figure out what happened because they were all just standing over the rapidly cooling corpse arguing over the proper term to describe the victim in their police report. Is she a coed? A sorority girl? A sorority sister? A sorority person? A female member of a sorority? A female member of a Greek campus organization? A bi-boobied former female with an extra hole in her head?
Click to expand...

that's not funny. it's just offensive.

though as your first link was from the daily heil i'm not surprised.

she was a student. and it was an awful thing to have happened.
 
but why? student works perfectly as a gender-neutral word.

why not make the male word the different one for a change?

student could be female and studentobongobingo could be the male one.
 
Common everyday language. The injustice of it all!!!!

The male-specific term is "college boy" and it's extremely derisive. "Don't you break my airplane, college boy!"
 
gturner said:
However, that isn't at all what I thought might be discussed in this thread. I figured people would wonder whether the police were much too aggressive, and.......
Click to expand...

I don't know why you're surprised. You're the one who kept escalating the co-ed issue.

I already agreed with you that something went very wrong. But I have no interest in trying to parse the details based on early and questionably reliable news reports. I mean, come on, the best source you could come up with was the Daily Mail?
 
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