Ho (n)

I learn from Andrew Gumbel, in last week's Independent, that the great hip hop guru Russell Simmons has called for a ban on the word "ho", which in his language is "an extreme curse word", along with "nigger" and "bitch". In hip hop parlance, a ho is a promiscuous woman, or else a prostitute, being, as Mr Gumbel explains, a shortened version of whore. Swear words have changed since the days when it was considered very bad form to exclaim "Christ" and when, going back much further, the word "cunt" was perfectly acceptable in polite society, and was hardly a thing worth swearing by. The sacred things of life are no longer spiritual. They are bodily.

The secularisation of swearing is pretty well universal in our culture and is not confined to the hip hoppers. The times are long gone since prioresses like Chaucer's would swear by St Loy and probably feel guilty about it: the change is hardly older (I'm guessing here) than about 70 years, though obviously gradual. People with residual feeling for the old way of thought might say "jeepers" or "crikey", thus excusing themselves from blasphemy, just as they had once said "by Cock's bones" or "Cocksbody". As for "the c- word", to call a person that now is about as rude as you can get, and I've always thought it odd that it's applied as often to men as it is to women. My Oxford American Dictionary doesn't even carry it, while my American spellchecker underlined it in red and asks if I don't mean "count".

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