Query About Etymological Discoveries

[George Thompson]

>
> A very interesting item! Is there any significant extended context?
>
> In particular: is it entirely certain what "hooker" meant in this item
> (aside from "Hook denizen", I mean)?
>
If I recall, the story wasn't detailed.  At the time, and up into the 20th C, it was permissible to arrest someone for being a "disorderly person" or a vagrant, living without visible means of support.

I think that in the early 19th C, the NYC waterfront east of the Battery -- where the Seaport Museum and the Brooklyn Bridge are now -- was the stretch where deep-water sailing vessels put in, and where the ship-building industry was centered.  Corlaer's Hook was the Sailortown, where the gin mills and brothels were, and the sailors' boarding houses.

To digress a bit: The cops raided a den of iniquity, and arrested the proprietor for keeping a disorderly house.  His defense was, that his place wasn't disorderly, because it was patronized by respectable people.  The judge said, that the people who patronized a disorderly house were disorderly people, and therefore the people who frequented his house were disorderly, not respectable, and therefore his house was a disorderly house, because it was frequented by disorderly people.  Pay the clerk your $50 fine, and don't let me see you in here again.

>What about another Hook in NYC?  Red Hook is a neighborhood in Brooklyn, on the waterfront of the
>Upper Bay just south of the tip of Manhattan

Red Hook was a Sailortown when my father was a merchant seaman, and working in the rum-fleet, but in the 1830s Brooklyn may have still been a village, and I doubt that Red Hook would have been a part of the port or that New Yorkers (i. e., Manhattanites) would be much concerned with whatever lewdness might have gone on there.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas G. Wilson" <douglas at NB.NET>
Date: Sunday, October 4, 2009 10:22 pm
Subject: Re: Query About Etymological Discoveries
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU

> George Thompson wrote:
> > ....
> >
> > Pris. -- . . . he called me a hooker. . . .
> > Mag. -- What did you call her a hooker for?
> > Wit. -- 'Cause she allers hangs round the hook, your honner.
> > New York Transcript, September 25, 1835, p. 2, col. 4
> >
> >   It certainly disproves the Gen. Hooker story, since he was but a
> lad in 1835.  It seems to prove the "hooker from Corlaer's Hook"
> story, except that the witness (a cop) might have been a
> folk-etymologist in his spare time.  There are certainly instances
> from the mid-19th century of whores as predators and the men, poor
> things, as their victims, supporting the hooker = fisherman story.
> --
>
> A very interesting item! Is there any significant extended context?
>
> In particular: is it entirely certain what "hooker" meant in this item
> (aside from "Hook denizen", I mean)?
>
> I assume the prisoner is complaining about being called a "hooker", so
> I
> suppose it must have been a negative appellation. But is it clear that
> it was exactly "prostitute"? Or is it possible that it was (e.g.)
> "thief", "pickpocket", "tout", or maybe even truly "Hook denizen" (with
> implication of low social status or whatever)? If it was "prostitute"
> is
> there any indication of whether it was specifically "sailors'
> prostitute" or some other specialization?
>
> Does anybody have other pre-1860 instances of "hooker" = "prostitute"
> aside from those in HDAS? [Sorry, I don't.]
>
> -- Doug Wilson
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org