Jennings was embarrassed as hell to say “ho.” I think he was blushing up to his eyeballs. If he had thought of rake he would have said it.
“Rake” was the first thing that I thought. I knew there had to be a funny alternate answer, but “ho” didn’t occur to me.
My dictionary is a couple of years old, but it’s not in there. And no, slang is not always an actual word. “Dude” is a word; “nizzle” is not.
But you said “It’s slang, not a word.” To me, that implies pretty strongly that ‘slang’ and ‘words’ are two different non-intersecting sets.