I work in the area of combinatorics on words and am not aware of any existing terminology for the type of subsequence that you are tentatively calling a "co-subsequence", so you can probably stick with this name if you like.

By the way, Joseph provided a nice list of books on words/strings. Here are two more that I would highly recommend:

 - M. Lothaire, "Algebraic Combinatorics on Words", vol. 90 of Encyclopedia of Mathematics and its Applications, Cambridge University Press, 2002
 
 - J.-P. Allouche & J. Shallit, "Automatic Sequences: Theory, Applications, Generalizations", Cambridge University Press, 2003

The first book and two others in the Lothaire series are freely available [here][1].


  [1]: http://www-igm.univ-mlv.fr/~berstel/Lothaire/index.html