Stanford cancels plans to bring half of undergrads back to campus

Re:Stanford cancels plans to bring half of undergrads back t... by barbecue_sauce on Friday August 14, 2020 @09:19AM (#24157541)

I was always under the impression that the word "frosh" was weird slang for freshmen, not a word considered just as proper for written communication.

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Re:Stanford cancels plans to bring half of undergrads back t... by danso on Friday August 14, 2020 @09:32AM (#24157697)

My immediate thought to your comment was that "frosh" is actually very common and accepted slang for "freshmen". That said, I did not expect to see it in the article's lede – or in the president's official statement [0]:

> We will continue planning with the hope and expectation of bringing undergraduates back to Stanford at the earliest possible time. If public health conditions allow, we plan to invite frosh, sophomores and new transfer students to be in residence on campus for the winter quarter, and juniors and seniors for the spring quarter.

[0] https://healthalerts.stanford.edu/covid-19/2020/08/13/autumn...

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Re:Stanford cancels plans to bring half of undergrads back t... by TechBro8615 on Friday August 14, 2020 @09:42AM (#24157808)

I imagine that's because "freshmen" is problematic in $CURRENT_YEAR, but it sounds too weird to say "freshpeople" so they went with the existing slang of "frosh."

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Re:Stanford cancels plans to bring half of undergrads back t... by danso on Friday August 14, 2020 @09:51AM (#24157911)

Considering it's a term that originated centuries before women were first allowed to attend college, I suppose it's reasonable to argue it has been long obsolete to the point of being problematic.

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Re:Stanford cancels plans to bring half of undergrads back t... by gedy on Friday August 14, 2020 @09:58AM (#24158006)

Doubleplusfresh

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Re:Stanford cancels plans to bring half of undergrads back t... by fortran77 on Friday August 14, 2020 @09:34AM (#24157727)

They say "frosh" now because "freshmen" is gender-specific. Many schools do this.

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Re:Stanford cancels plans to bring half of undergrads back t... by tantalor on Friday August 14, 2020 @11:57AM (#24159599)

University administrators have now begun the process of replacing the terms “freshman” and “upperclassman” with the gender-neutral terms “first year” and “upper-level students” in official campus publications... “It’s really for public, formal correspondence and formal publications … we’re not trying to tell people what language to use in their everyday casual conversations,” Chun said. “We’re not trying to be language police.”

https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2017/09/15/yale-formalizes-fr...

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Re:Stanford cancels plans to bring half of undergrads back t... by neltnerb on Friday August 14, 2020 @09:43AM (#24157815)

I've only ever seen schools switch from freshman to "first year". Frosh is slang.

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Re:Stanford cancels plans to bring half of undergrads back t... by BlueScreenDeath on Friday August 14, 2020 @09:21AM (#24157563)

Although frosh refers to a first-year student and has a resemblance to fresh, freshman is not believed to be the source of the word. More likely, frosh is from the dialectic German word for a frog, Frosch. ... Students already had a slang term for freshman, the diminutive freshie.

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Re:Stanford cancels plans to bring half of undergrads back t... by neltnerb on Friday August 14, 2020 @09:42AM (#24157807)

The question "what it is slang for" is different from the question "what is the word derived from". The prior may well change if everyone has a group delusion and believes it is slang for something different. The latter obviously not.

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