Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

Miss Poubelle lives in the state of New York, which saw drama last month over former governor Eliot Spitzer's dalliances with prostitutes. Spitzer, as Client 9 at the Emperors Club, spent upwards of $80,000 on prostitutes in New York and Washington, D.C. When this became public, he resigned.

Another prostitute scandal has emerged, on the other side of the Atlantic, involving Max Mosley, head of Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile, a consortium of national auto clubs and overseer of Formula One racing. Mosley appears on a sex tape with five prostitutes, itself only a minor scandal. But on the tape, Mosley appears to be acting out a Nazi concentration-camp fantasy, whipping women in prison outfits, while shouting, "Ein, zwei, drei!" Making the scandal more toothsome is that Mosley is the son of Sir Oswald Mosley and Diana Mitford, prominent Nazi sympathizers during World War II. Sir Oswald organized the British Union of Fascists and was married at Joseph Goebbels' Berlin home.

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midst this controversy, Blanche found herself wondering about the language used to describe the paid companions of Spitzer and Mosley. She recalled reading that prostitute is a 17th-century euphemism, from the Latin verb prostituere which means "to offer for sale," and its earliest uses in English are as a verb. In the earliest quotations, men and women prostitute or prostitute themselves for money. Initially, prostitute was not a name for the seller, but for the act of selling.

Blanche wondered about words used for ladies- (and gentlemen-) of-the-evening before prostitute came to be the polite standard. The main alternative still in use in English is whore.

Whore is the oldest English word for the world's oldest profession. It dates to Old English texts from 1100, and is related to similar words in German, Dutch, Gothic, and Scandinavian. Whore (now often pronounced ho) is still a common word in English, but hasn't been considered polite for mixed company for about 500 years.

Whore shows up in 14th century Bible translations, so was not taboo in earlier English. But by the 16th century, the less offensive word harlot was being used in its place. For example, in the story of the prodigal son (Luke 15), the Tindale translation of 1526 writes "Thy sonne which hath devoured thy goodes with harlootes," where the 14th century version had used the word hoores.

To get a rough sense of how frequent these words are, Blanche googled them and got nine million hits for prostitute, and 37 million hits for whore. Other terms that show up with frequency are hooker, with 17 million hits (though many of these have to do with knitting or people named Hooker) and call girl, with five million hits.

Neither hooker nor call girl is a very old word. Hooker is 19th-century American slang. (Blanche has seen the suggestion that the word comes from the Civil War general Joseph Hooker, who supposedly was a frequent customer of prostitutes. However, there is a citation of the word from 1845 in North Carolina, long enough before the Civil War that any connection with the general seems unlikely.) Hooker has an older history as a word for "thief," presumably because one way of stealing uses a hook to snatch an item from an unsuspecting owner.

Call girl is even more recent and dates to only 1940. Since it refers to women who take phone calls for their services, it's not surprising that the term dates only from after widespread use of telephones. (Did the Victorians have telegraph girls?)

Beyond these few words, English has a rich trove of terms for prostitutes, but sadly, few of them are still in use. Blanche found harlot, trollop, trull, drab, strumpet, slut, and slattern, among others.

Whatever the women and men who do this kind of work are called, they remain lightening rods for figures in the public eye. Blanche believes that prostitution ought to be legal, and so the legal system should be involved only in cases of coercion or violence. Otherwise, our sexual lives should be in the public eye only if we choose.

In the case of Eliot Spitzer, his resignation seemed unavoidable because of his past conduct as a prosecutor of prostitution rings. The startling conflict between his law-and-order public persona and his private whoremongering doomed his career.

The case of Mosley is different, it seems to Blanche, because there is no relationship between his job as president of the international motoring association and his private sexual behavior. Blanche does not care to live in a society where her employment depends on public approval of her sex life.