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

[Laurence Horn]

At 5:04 PM -0400 4/23/11, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>Melville used "Land ho."
>
>JL

And then there was John Wayne, a notorious westward ho.

LH

>
>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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>
>
>
>--
>"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>
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