ho = 'eager or gullible enthusiast, usu. female (for); "sucker" (for).'

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:23 AM -0400 4/23/11, Ben Zimmer wrote:
>On Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 11:20 AM, Jonathan Lighter
><wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>  2011  http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/153089481 : First I should
>>  mention that I am a "ho" for "Letters" compendia. That being said, TE
>>  [Lawrence] was a really fascinating dude.
>
>Isn't this just a variation of the "X whore" snowclonelet, glossed by
>Arnold Zwicky as 'one who craves X (or something to do with X)
>extravagantly'?
>
>http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2010/12/21/x-whore/
>
>--bgz

With some possibility of confusion, since a "man whore" is apparently
the masculine form of "whore", although "whore" has itself arguably
achieved sex-neutrality; the hits for "he's a whore" outnumber those
for "she's a whore", and that's with all the references to the 17th
century play _'Tis pity she's a whore_.  But still, while there are a
lot of ghits for "man whores" there don't seem to be many for "woman
whores" or "female whores".  Intriguingly there's this from
urbandictionary:

_woman whore_:
A woman who sleeps around a lot, but she does it in the manner that a
man whore would, i.e. she is the one in control, and the men she is
sleeping with are the ones being used.

In any case, the "man" and "woman" in these constructions are agents
in the compounds and not goals (as with "crack whore", "cock whore",
"media whore", or the others in Arnold's blog post.  There's also
"man ho", which is amply attested--and not just for a village in
Bhamo Township in Bhamo District in the Kachin State of north-eastern
Burma, but for Justin Timberlake, Tiger Woods, and similar strivers
for this status.

LH

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