Say you're the minister of a tiny Lutheran church in a small town in a state few can even recall the capital of. How do you get your name not only in the local paper, but picked up by the news networks and have it published and broadcast all over the country?For Rev. David J. Baer of Whitewood, South Dakota, the answer came to him as if a message from God.
Complain to the town council about the name of a street, and demand the name be changed.
"Hooker Street doesn't quite lend itself to a family atmosphere and is offensive to some residents in the town of about 800 people, according to Baer," news sites across the world proclaimed today.
The street was named for Gen. Joseph "Fighting Joe" Hooker, a Union general during the American Civil War.
Even changing the name to "General Joseph Hooker Street" wouldn't satisfy the reverend, the article says.
The article doesn't actually go into why the word "hooker" bothers Baer so much. Hooker, of course, is another word for prostitute.
Perhaps he fears the street will become a red light district, or maybe Baer just believes the myth that Gen. Hooker is the etymological source of the slang term hooker for prostitute. Dictionary.com dispels this story thusly:
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, the men under Hooker's command during the Civil War were a particularly wild bunch, and would spend much of their time in brothels when on leave. For this reason, as the story goes, prostitutes came to be known as hookers. However attractive this theory may be, it cannot be true. The word hooker with the sense "prostitute" is already 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." The term portrays a prostitute as a person who "hooks, or snares, clients."While just 35 miles away in Rapid City, an 18-year old man is charged with brutally raping a 3-year old boy, Rev. David "Family Values" Baer is using his pulpit to demand the town protect its 800 residents from being offended by a man's last name. I think he's got his priorities a little, uh, screwed up. There are those who obviously could have used some ministerial services nearby.
What's next for Baer (whose own last name is both an anagram and a homonym — uh oh... homo!? — of "bare," which means "naked")?
Rumor has it the next windmill he tilts with will be the nearby state of Idaho, which is, as is so blatantly obvious as to offend even me, Ebonics for "I am a whore."
Image: The Red Light district in Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Whitewood, South Dakota | Joseph Hooker | Rev. David J. Baer | Offensive | Christians | Burning Taper | BurningTaper.com
