By Rena Webb

Based on blunt Anglo-Saxon, derived from Latin, borrowed from the French, the English language provides a rich potpourri of synonyms for every noun and verb.

Influenced by religious colonists and latter-day Victorian prudishness, inventive Americans devised colorful but delicately phrased references for females practicing the world’s oldest profession and for the places where they entertained their customers.

Sometimes such nouns were peculiar to a specific area of the country. But most of them were common parlance, easily recognizable by any amorous gentleman looking for intimate companionship in an unfamiliar town.

Rarely did the "w" word surface in polite society, especially in print, until Burt Reynolds and Dolly Parton romped through their 1982 movie, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

Pleasure palaces were instead referred to as bagnios, bordellos or brothels, cathouses or cribs, and a plethora of "houses."

There were bawdy houses, sporting houses and rooming houses. Houses of ill fame or ill repute and upstairs houses.

Located in tenderloin or red light districts, they "housed" scarlet women, daughters of joy, ladies of the evening, soiled doves, upstairs girls, parlor girls, working girls, or simply "the girls."

Even in raw gold camps like Deadwood, western frankness stopped short of calling a spade a spade, at least publicly.

Early day newspapers mentioned Deadwood’s badlands and Lead’s tenderloin district and Lime Kiln Alley where "denizens of the lower gulch" resided. Unhampered by today’s politically correct thinking, writers referred to "darkies" living in "darktown" or "coonville" and "Celestial Flowers" of Chinatown.

Deadwood terminology fell into the house category – upstairs houses in conversations; rooming houses in census records and city directories.

After telephones were installed, directories listed a suspicious number of "misses" with different last names, all living at the same street address in what was designated as a rooming house or boarding house.

And whatever their ages, in Deadwood prostitutes forever remained girls.

Working girls rarely, if ever, used the names on their birth certificates. Many of their pseudonyms printed in local newspapers, generally in connection with some violation of the law, were colorful to say the least.

Nationalities were disclosed by names like Black Nell, Dutch Annie, Swede Lizzie, Jin Lou and Sin Moy.

Some names referred to physical characteristics or personal idiosyncrasies like Battle Axe Leo, Big Blanche, Gold Tooth, Limpy, Long Mary, Popcorn Jennie and Whiskey Alice.

Popular female names of the day were represented by Alice, Belle, Daisy and Eva, Fannie and Ida, Hattie and Jenny, Millie, Mollie and Martha.

There were varied versions of Kate, Katie and Kitty, as well as Margaret and Maggie. Fay Mellette was known as Little Fay and Nellie Fay as Redheaded Nell.

The terms hog ranch and chicken ranch were common western regional expressions, giving cowboys a clue to what kind of wild ride they could expect at that spread.

Hog ranches were the favorite euphemism for private enterprises along the Cheyenne-Deadwood stagecoach route and near military camps and forts.

Speculating on the hog ranch appellation one teamster, a frequent visitor at those establishments, said he never saw any hogs around but thought it had reference to the girls as they were "a very low, tough set."

Others attributed the name to unsanitary conditions of the crude shacks. But some old timers claimed that a hog ranch prostitute and her male patrons closely resembled an old sow with her litter of pigs.

As the Wild West was tamed, entrepreneurs marketing pleasures of the flesh ran into an advertising problem. The difficulty of telling prospective clients about the proffered commodity without attracting undue attention from lawmen.

Railroad conductors advertised the location of a private club at 555 Main Street. They wore brass belt buckles inscribed with three fives to let traveling salesmen know where to find booze and women.

Massage parlor was a term in widespread usage in the cities, one not kindly accepted by the legitimate professional masseuse.

But the ultimate in delicate description surfaced in a phone call from a former resident of Dixie’s Green Door. She said she’d worked in an East Coast "conversation parlor" before coming to Deadwood.

That unfamiliar name for a cathouse was a puzzler until Funk & Wagnalls provided the explanation:

con.ver.sa.tion n. 2. Intimate association or intercourse.

So what’s in a name?