"Hookers" in Washington Post

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    I do this just to see George Thompson cry.
    The New York Times's Maureen Dowd recently got this wrong.  (It was the Times, so there was no correction.)  The Washington Post got this wrong before--as late as a year ago.  IS SOMEONE HIDING DICTIONARIES?  See also www.washingtonpost.com and send e-mail letters to letters at washpost.com.
    From the WASHINGTON POST, 2 September 2000, "Free For All," pg. A23, col. 1:

_Hookers in History_
    Robert Kaiser's otherwise entertaining story about Washington in the age of Lincoln ("Mr. Lincoln's Town: Muddy and Southern," front page, Aug. 28) repeats the canard that the term "hooker" finds its origin in the houses of ill repute often visited by troops under the command of Union Gen. Joseph Hooker.  As the etymologists at the American Heritage Dictionary explain, however, "there is one thing of which he is often accused that 'Fighting Joe' Hooker certainly did not do: He did not give his name to prostitutes."
     In fact, use of the term "hooker" as slang for prostitute predated the Civil War.  It appears in the 1859 edition of John Russell Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms, where hooker is described as "strumpet, a sailor's trull."  Earlier uses of the term, dating to the first half of the 19th century, also can be found.  Bartlett believed that the word could be traced to Corlear's Hook, a New York City neighborhood that was frequented by sailors.
     To be sure, Hooker's troops were notoriously dissolute, at least during their time in Washington.  And Hooker himself was described by U.S. Grant as "a dangerous man" who was "not subordinate to his superiors."  But whatever Hooker's faults--and notwithstanding the happy coincidence between his name and his reputed fondness for ladies of the evening--Gen. Hooker cannot be tagged with lending his name to their profession.
--Charles Rothfeld