I don’t want to be a wet blanket who takes all the fun out of wordplay, but I have to say, the whole “crocheters are hookers” thing makes me a little nuts. In my own personal opinion (and you may certainly disagree), crochet gets little enough respect in the world at large without calling its practitioners the same name as those who ply their trade at the world’s oldest profession.
Why is it that crocheters have to be called anything other than crocheters? Is it the dicey spelling? Is it supposed to make us more palatable to the noncrocheting world? Are there any cutesy names for knitters that I am missing? At the risk of sounding like a bad Seinfeld parody, what’s up with that?
One yarny magazine for which I wrote wanted to avoid the whole hooker issue and referred to crocheters throughout as loopers. Loopers? That brings up pot holders for me but, okay, at least it doesn’t have a preexisting negative connotation.
Sometimes a group needs to fight for their label in the interest of self-respect. When I worked on costumes in the entertainment industry, I always identified myself as a tailor or a stitcher. But that had a spelling reason. Think for a minute, how do you spell the word meaning one who sews, which is pronounced soh-er? Sewer. How do spell that underground morass filled with waste water, which is pronounced soo-er? See? I want to be confused with a dank underground cesspool even less than I want to be confused with a lady of the evening.
The problem with words that identify a person with one craft or another, is they aren’t real helpful for those of us who are multicraftual. Does identifying a person as a crocheter or a knitter (or a spinner or a quilter) mean that they do just that craft and no others? That seems a little limiting to me. That single-craft identifier can lead one trippingly down the primrose path to stereotyping as well—it’s easy to make a generalization about a small group if that group is identified as “other.” And now I sound like a bad sociology professor instead of a stand-up parodist—sorry about that.
There are a lot of terms describing a practitioner of the world’s oldest profession—lady of the evening, streetwalker, escort, hooker—because polite society does not want to come out and say “prostitute,” which is what one is talking about. The less descriptive terms make the job more palatable in conversation.
But you know what? I don’t think people need to avoid saying “crocheter” in any conversation at all, no matter where it is held, or what age the participants. There is nothing even vaguely shameful about crochet.
So if you must call me something, I prefer author, designer, stitcher, and even the somewhat bulky needlecrafter. I will accept crocheter with good grace, although that is not all that I am. Just please, don’t call me a hooker. Not even a happy one.