Friday, March 02, 2012

Coeds and Mr. Limbaugh

We were talking about clippings in my morphology class and I asked them if they were familiar with calling a female college student a "coed."  As has always happened in recent years they looked at me blankly.  That seems to be gone for young people.  But not for Mr. Limbaugh!  In his now-famous comments about Sandra Fluke, he said this:
What does it say about the college co-ed Susan Fluke [sic] who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex -- what does that make her?
What's especially odd about this usage is that - at least to me - she's not a coed, because she's a law student.  But that may have been part of RL's way of denigrating her - to call her something that lowered her status (if you accept that a law student has higher status than a regular college student ;-).

1 comment:

The Ridger, FCD said...

Oh, yeah. I'm sure that for Limbaugh this was part of denigrating her - he makes her sound like she's 19 and totally irresponsible, probably not even going to graduate.