Ladies of the night, etc.

Looking for old posts to recycle, I was grubbing around among those I had written in 2004 when I came across a rather feeble and facetious piece about what Sainsbury's call their staff, in which I had written en passant that calling prostitutes "sex workers" seemed to me a bit silly. The post was not interesting enough for re-cycling, but surprisingly it had evoked over two thousand words of fascinating and erudite comment from several ladies, none of whom, as far as one can tell, were prostitutes, and what they said is certainly worth another look, containing as it does a great deal of information of value to glossarists.