My dissertation is just about done, and I’ve begun circulating it to folks for comment. This morning, one erudite friend dropped me a line to tell me something I probably should have known.

I use the word “studentry” a half-dozen times in the dissertation, to refer to American students as a group. As it turns out, the term was popularized by William Strunk, the principal author of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style.

Here’s that story as White tells it:

“Will knew where he stood. … he had a number of likes and dislikes that were almost as whimsical as the choice of a necktie, yet he made them seem utterly convincing. … He despised the expression student body, which he termed gruesome, and made a special trip downtown to the Alumni News office one day to protest the expression and suggest that studentry be substituted — a coinage of his own, which he felt was similar to citizenry.”

White gave Strunk too much credit here, as the word “studentry” predates him — I found it in a book on German poetry that was published in 1830. (“Here was a court to talk about, a theatre to frequent, a considerable population to observe, and a manlier studentry to mingle with; and Schiller began to question many of his former points of view.”) But the term does seem to have been given a boost by Strunk and White’s efforts.

At least as important, Strunk’s rationale — the parallelism with “citizenry” — strikes me as exactly right. The students of a college, or of a nation, constitute a community of interest, a collective that deserves a more robust descriptor than “student body.” The word has been adopted in that sense by historians of student activism, and it’s a worthy addition to the language.