If a Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose, What Is a Ho?
The Society to Preserve Dorothy Parker has retained a lawyer and is pondering its next move as the debate over the use of the hip-hop word “ho” grows more heated.
The reason: One of Parker’s more famous humorous utterances is now frequently quoted — and mangled — in the contentious tugging and pulling over “ho”, a racially-charged term describing women in an offensive and denigrating manner.
Parker was one of New Yorker magazine’s most famous writers. She died in 1967. A bona fide wit, she was once challenged to use a sentence with the word “horticulture” in it, apparently while playing a parlor game with friends.
“You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think,” she said.
What has outraged the Society to Preserve Dorothy Parker is how the sentence is being used in the debate over hip-hop music lyrics. Consider this riff from rapper Lil Man Grillman, delivered to an astonished Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s “The Situation Room”.
“Yo, Wolf, My Man
Ya can lead a ho ta culture, but you can’t make her think
Ya can lead a ho ta culture, but don’t let her drink
Ya can lead a ho ta culture, but you don’t wanta stink
So jes lead ya ho ta culture and drop her in the sink.”
Christine Haverman, president of the Society to Preserve Dorothy Parker, was not amused.
“I never watch CNN, dreadfully too much shouting,” she said. “But when I saw the clip of the interview with Mr. Grillman, if that’s his name, I was appalled, utterly and simply appalled,” she said.
“Dorothy Parker was about wit and class and literature and savoir faire. We cannot, just cannot, let her work be sullied by this tawdry argument over the meaning and appropriate use of a word like ‘ho’, which I had never heard of until recently and I’m very well read, thank you.”
The society has retained celebrity copyright lawyer Eustace Towers Conning, who represented author Tom Clancy in the celebrated dispute over copyright ownership of the word “submarine”.
Conning said his staff is poring over Parker’s written works looking for even a single use of the horticulture sentence.
“Obviously, if we find one, then it’s protected by copyright and the game is over,” Conning said. “The rappers can cease and desist or we’ll sue their keisters beyond the far side of the moon.”
And if it turns out the sentence is not copyrighted?
“I’ll reach out to the publishers, who actually control all of this bad-boy, hip-hop behavior, and see if we can find an amicable solution,” he said. “You can be sure the Sumner Redstones and Rupert Murdochs of the world don’t want their legacies to be that they sullied the memory of Dorothy Parker in order to make another dollar or two.”