Think of persons, male or female, whose appearance you find pleasing enough so that you would use one of the above adjectives to describe them. Do you draw distinctions in the meanings of those words? If so, what are those distinctions?
In your answer, please give any whatever information about yourself–age, gender, rage, location, and so forth–that you feel might cast any light on the way you use the words in question. Unless of course you can’t be arsed. It’s not like I actually have hordes of flying lizards in my basement, ready to be unleashed.
To answer my own question:
I’m a 40something mostly-straight-but-WOW-is-Taye-Diggs-good-looking black male living in Tennessee. To me, most of the above words have distinct meanings. To wit:
Pretty is a comment on a woman’s face. It means that her face, taken all by itself, is aesthetically pleasing, a biological work of art. It does not necessarily mean that I’m sexually attracted to her. I’d never use it as a compliment for a male.
Beautiful is a more intense pretty, but it doesn’t necessarily imply that I’m sexually attracted to her either. Handsome would be the male equivalent.
Hot is a comment on a persons’s body than his or her face. It definitely implies sexual attraction.
Sexy is a comment on the person’s personality, or sometimes personality; it means that the way he or she conducts himself or herself makes me think of sex. Obviously it implies attraction, but it doesn’t imply that the person is beautiful, pretty, or even hot. KD Lang is extremely sexy, for instance; so is Mandy Patinkin. But neither is hot, handsome, or beautiful.
Gorgeous means that a person is both sexy and beautiful/handsome.
Cute means aesthetically pleasant, perhaps even sexy, in a way that is more than the sum of the person’s parts. Alyson Hannigan, playing Willow Rosenberg, is cute rather than beautiful.
Having written all that–the praise I’m most likely to give a woman is comely. But I’m weird, as y’all may have noticed. 
Anybody else?
