hooker

Word History: In his Personal Memoirs Ulysses S. Grant described Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker as "a dangerous man ... not subordinate to his superiors." Hooker had his faults. He may indeed have been insubordinate; he was undoubtedly an erratic leader. But "Fighting Joe" Hooker is often accused of one thing he certainly did not do: he did not give his name to prostitutes. According to a popular story about the origin of the term hooker, the men under Hooker's command during the Civil War were a particularly wild bunch who would spend much of their time in brothels when on leave, and thus prostitutes came to be known as hookers. However, this tale of the origin of hooker cannot be true. The explanation of this highlights a procedure that etymologists often use when trying to evaluate proposed etymologies that relate the origin of a word to a specific historical event or to the name of a historical person: if the word is attested before the event occurred, or before the person lived, then the word cannot have originated with that event or in that person's name. In fact, the word hooker with the sense "prostitute" is recorded before the Civil War. As early as 1845 it is found in North Carolina, as reported in Norman Ellsworth Eliason's Tarheel Talk: An Historical Study of the English Language in North Carolina to 1860, published in 1956. It also appears in the second edition of John Russell Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms, published in 1859, where it is defined as "a strumpet, a sailor's trull." Etymologically, it is most likely that hooker is simply "one who hooks or snares clients."