gorgeous

   This word was originally applied to a person or object adorned with brilliant colours, but a gorgeous girl is now a beautiful one, regardless of her clothes. The workman who hails a passing young lady as ‘Hello, gorgeous’ is simply expressing general admiration. In The Exhibitionist an American addresses his step-daughter in this way. An Englishman uses it to a woman in Love in Quiet Places, by Bernard Thompson. In Sandra, by Pearl Bell, it is used to the heroine by a new acquaintance, described by the author as a ‘slangy young American’. The term may have been in vogue when the novel was published, sometime in the late 1920s. It continues in use, often as in Fares Please, by Edith Courtney, where a man working in a bus garage enters a room, puts his arm around a busconductress, and says: ‘Hello, gorgeous, still love me?’ Modern women may object to the term on the grounds that it treats them like sexual objects.