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See, I always just thought of "pledging" as what goes on during the actual pledging ceremony, where you officially become a new member of your organization. We were encouraged not to say, "I'm pledging AZD," but rather to say, "I am an AZD new member" (though we often slipped and said "AZD pledge" to clarify that while we had joined and pledged during the ceremony, we were not initiated yet).
And since NPC went all PC on everyone, I always heard about my "new member period," not my "pledgeship." It was stressed to us that while we might not yet be initiated, we were becoming sisters with the women of the chapter and learning about what set Alpha Xi Delta apart from other sororities. It's still kind of a hold-over that girls don't really refer to themselves as "sisters" until initiation, just to keep things clear. We did refer to our NM class as our pledge class and our pledge sisters, but if we were somewhere with a group of NMs and initiates, we usually just let them call themselves sisters and called ourselves NMs/pledges.
It's kind of confusing when you've got girls that have heard the "old" terms like rush, pledges, etc. (like myself) all their lives and then come to school and the "new"ones are used (not to mention the girls that come through practically expecting to be hazed! Good Lord, I must have told a hundred girls last fall that no, we do not haze!), plus a fraternity system that still hasn't made a cohesive effort to change their terminology to something more similar. Even though the signs up for fraternity recruitment advertise "formal fraternity recruitment," no fraternity guy (except those on IFC) calls it anything but rush, and the guys will still call themselves pledges. It's almost like most of the fraternity guys I know are making an effort not to change their way of thinking about it.
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