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

[Jonathan Lighter]

Melville used "Land ho."

JL

On Sat, Apr 23, 2011 at 3:59 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: ho = 'eager or gullible enthusiast,               usu.
> female
>              (for); "sucker" (for).'
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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