Hey, hey. Ho, ho. We coeds want these dudes to go.

I've been on a name-calling kick since last Wednesday. Can't get our little social characterizations out of my mind.

A couple questions:

• Isn't it astonishing that it is still appropriate (in many circles) to refer to a collegiate woman as a coed? Of all the epithets born in the last century, that's on the short list of those I'm surprised to see in use. It seems to be a newspaper word, one you're more likely to see in print than hear casually spoken.
  
  


• Does anybody else out there think that the term dude has suddenly been stripped of its exclusively masculine charater? A woman who is one of my wife's best friends uses this term as a universal descriptor: Men are dudes. Women are dudes. I'm not sure, but I think pets might be dudes, too. Is this becoming the norm?