ho 'whore' (What Santa Claus might say in some dialects?)

[Neal Whitman]

http://literalminded.wordpress.com/2005/11/30/santas-hos/

Neal

On Oct 8, 2013, at 12:21 PM, Charles C Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Charles C Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU>
> Subject:      ho 'whore'  (What Santa Claus might say in some dialects?)
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>
> I teach a one-hour-per-week freshman seminar called "Lore and Language of College Life."  Yesterday a student had introduced the expression (proverb? folk belief? jocularly-pretended folk belief?) "The bigger the O, the bigger the ho."  ("O," btw, means 'circular dangling ear-ring').
>
> As a coda to that discussion, one student inquired, with wide eyes, "Where does that word 'ho' come from?"  A couple of other students also expressed curiosity.  (They all knew the word "ho," of course.)  I could hardly believe that the etymology of "ho" has become opaque so quickly!
>
> A further note:  Googling, I discover that the spelling "hoe" (in the expression) is far more common than "ho"--perhaps further indicating the loss of the sense that "ho" (so spelled) comes from "whore."  Unless I'm missing some arcane agricultural sense of the expression . . . .
>
> --Charlie
>
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