by Anura Guruge
on July 26, 2022
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I recently met a lady, a married lady, whose last name is ‘Hooker‘. Given my fascination with names, I had to ask. She had obviously had the question before. She had an answer down pat — & it cracked me up:
“I got married and became a hooker. I wasn’t a hooker before that.”
Since this was her second marriage & she had done that later in her life she could not, alas, tell me what it was like to grow up as female whose last name was Hooker.
I kind of had guessed that the name must be associated with ‘hooks’ — possibly to do with weaving. Well, I was close.
When I thought about it more I remembered the infamous Civil War General Joseph Hooker (1814 — 1879). I, however, had NO IDEA that some think that the prostitution connotation of the word is (erroneously it would appear) attributed to him. See below:
I guess I would opt for 3) — the snagging or HOOKING of men.
I can’t be 100% sure, but I don’t think ‘hooker’ in the pejorative manner was used in the U.K. in the 1960s or 1970s. Given how American culture has now overrun Britain (especially via movies & songs) I am sure that things have changed & all Brits will know what a ‘hooker’ means.
The words we used were: scrubber, tart, slag, slapper & sometimes crumpet (though that was also used to describe ‘nice’ (but possibly somewhat ‘easy’) girls.
