Generalized Whore

[Jonathan Lighter]

At the touch of a button, one can Google up about 100,000 hits for "crack whore" ( a woman - later anyone - so addicted as to perform sex acts in return for crack cocaine).

JL

Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at RCI.RUTGERS.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Benjamin Zimmer
Subject: Re: Generalized Whore
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On Sun, 19 Jun 2005 17:34:20 -0400, Benjamin Zimmer
wrote:

>Benjamin Barrett wrote:
>>
>> "A clothes whore" gets no fewer than 332 Googits, [snip]

(I get 1,330 hits, by the way.)

>fashion whore: 6,220
>label whore: 5,680
>shoe whore: 3,660

Of these, the earliest found by a quick database search is "clothes
whore", from 1987. (Toronto Star, 4/22/87, p. G3: "But suffer she must
because she is 'a clothes whore' - the willing victim of fashion.") I
wonder if this was helped along by the semantically and phonetically
similar "clotheshorse".

>Sam Clements wrote:
>>
>>"Attention whore" gets 79,000 Google hits.
>
>camera whore: 11,000
>publicity whore: 5,340

"Publicity whore" also dates to 1987. (L.A. Times, 10/11/87, p. 27,
interview with David Mamet: "I'm a publicity whore just like the rest of
them. But I'm not a bimbo.")

All of the above also have variants with "slut" instead of "whore".


--Ben Zimmer


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