What I was really hoping for, though, was for someone to call me out on my use of the word 'ho. Not the fact that I used it, because it's pretty tame in terms of language, and pretty much everyone realizes that a 'ho is not actually a paid prostitute. Well, not all the time, anyway. Hell, these days it's hard to tell how sincere any descriptive title is, seeing as we've appropriated most terms into our vernacular to encompass any close acquaintance or ally. You know the terms I'm talking about.
No, I'm talking about my actual syntactical (is that a word?) approach to the word 'ho. For whatever reason, I've always felt most appropriate putting an apostrophe at the front of the word. After all, 'ho is essentially a contraction of the word "whore." In the case of a contracted word, an apostrophe denotes the missing component of the word. The apostrophe at the beginning denotes that a "W" should be in its place, but has been dropped. By that logic, I should add an apostrophe to represent the abandoned "RE," similar to the "and" in "rock 'n' roll." The result, 'ho', would look more like I were opting to put the word in single quotes for no good reason.
You could omit the apostrophes and treat it as its own word, ho. However, something looks incomplete about it. Technically, the oft-used plural, hos, would be awkward; one should add an "E" to make it "hoes." Some prefer to use "hoe" as the singular form. However, I avoid these because in the singular form, the "E" looks spurious, and either way "hoe" is a direct replacement for the garden tool. Needless to say, one would not use a garden hoe for the same purposes as a human hoe...however, it's an awkward situation nonetheless.
All this trouble could be avoided by simply using the word whore. After all, there's no confusing a full word for anything else. However, as mentioned before, whore has absolute connotations signifying the flesh trade and the exchange of sex for payment. It also implies promiscuity. The same connotations, interestingly, are not true of the abbreviations of "whore." The only absolute implication of the word 'ho is to indicate possession and superiority, not unlike the origin word itself.
Of course, all this trouble could also be avoided by keeping grammar nerds from using such vernacular. But what fun would that be?
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