Hookers, johns and a Latin verb: the vocabulary of prostitution decoded
A popular tale says hooker honours a Union general in the American Civil War. The likelier source is a patch of 1820s Manhattan waterfront called Corlear's Hook. The rude English word whore, meanwhile, shares a deep root with the French for dear and the Latin for charity.
Prostitute comes from Latin prostituta. One reading splits it into pro, forward, and stituere, to offer for sale; another pairs pro with statuere, to set upright or station. Either way the literal sense is placing something out front to be bought. The Online Etymology Dictionary points out that payment is not actually built into the word, which suggests someone exposed to lust rather than a hired worker.
Whore descends from Old English hora and Proto-Germanic hōrōn, and before that from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning desire. That same root produced Latin carus, dear, which gave French cher, and caritas, love or charity. English speakers treat the word as an insult, but in Germany most prostitutes' organisations choose Hure on purpose, finding the formal term too bureaucratic. Activist groups elsewhere have preferred sex worker since the late 1970s, although that phrase can cover anyone in the wider sex industry.
Street names for buyers are equally revealing. North Americans say johns or tricks and Britons and the Irish say punters; john probably grew from customers giving the common name John to stay anonymous. Men cruising red-light districts in cars are kerb crawlers in some places. The hooker story ties to shipyards and a ferry terminal at Corlear's Hook, where women gathered in the 1820s, rather than to General Joseph Hooker.
The word also works as a political insult. Joseph Stalin famously branded Leon Trotsky a political prostitute, and Trotsky returned the phrase, applying it to German Social Democracy and, in 1938, to a Comintern he said Stalin had degraded to court Western democracies. Holden Caulfield, narrator of The Catcher in the Rye, uses it too, calling his brother a prostitute for writing Hollywood screenplays. The researcher Gail Pheterson traces this figurative use to a Christian moral tradition that equated the word with debasing oneself or others for dishonest gain.
Source: Prostitution
