Cute hoor

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In Hiberno-English, a cute hoor is a sly, cunning rogue.^[1]^[2] It is someone who will do whatever it takes to achieve what they want. Usually a cute hoor will not break the law but it is seen as willing to bend and use the law, use people or use situations to come out on top, by pulling dishonest or misleading stunts en route. In this context cute has its older sense of shrewdness, as a clipped form of acute.^[3] The word hoor (rhymes with "sure" or "newer") is a pronunciation spelling of an old pronunciation of the word whore, but the term cute hoor has no sexual connotations, referring to more general roguishness.

The term cute hoor is often used as a quasi-affectionate term, for someone whose utter unreliability and untrustworthiness is well known, seen through and treated almost as a joke. Then Tánaiste Brian Lenihan was described as a cute hoor on a Late Late Show TV special about him in 1990 by some of his colleagues and friends, who recounted stories of his unreliability, including promising parents he'd get jobs for their children, then losing the piece of paper on which he'd recorded the details, or making 'spur of the moment' promises to voters during elections that would be forgotten as quickly as they were thought of. In Lenihan's case, his cute hoor image came back to haunt him when the question of his trustworthiness and reliability became a central issue in the 1990 presidential election, an election he sensationally lost to Mary Robinson.