'Nasty woman' and 'bad hombres': The real debate winners?

In one corner, we had "bad hombres." In the other, "nasty woman."

The phrases were both uttered by Donald Trump during the third and final debate against Hillary Clinton on Wednesday night in Las Vegas, in the bitter race for the White House.

And the internet pounced, adding them to its meme factory and its profiteering assembly line, even as the terms drew mocking comments and disgust from social media users.

Within hours, dozens of sellers on Etsy had whipped up merchandise — T-shirts and buttons — bearing both slogans. Comedian Chelsea Handler tossed out a poll to Twitter users: "Are you a bad hombre or a nasty woman?" After about 12 hours, "nasty woman" was winning with 60 percent of the vote.

Trump, the Republican nominee, unfurled the "hombre" line when he took on a question about immigration from the moderator, Chris Wallace.

"And once the border is secured, at a later date, we'll make a determination as to the rest. But we have some bad hombres here, and we're going to get them out," he said.

Critics howled that the phrase was racist and in line with his previous description of undocumented Mexican immigrants as criminals, drug dealers and "rapists," though he allowed at the time that some of them were "good people."

Later in the debate, as Clinton, the Democratic nominee, was explaining her plan to improve the Social Security program, Trump muttered, "Such a nasty woman."

That set off a fierce reaction on Twitter, as women sought to reclaim and embrace a label that many saw as another in a long line of sexist insults unleashed by Trump at women.

"From one #NastyWoman to another, you were an inspiration last night," Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House, tweeted on Thursday.

"RT if you're a nasty woman and it's made your life a freakin' pleasure," the actress and creator of "Girls" Lena Dunham posted on Twitter. Within an hour, it had 1,300 retweets.

At Vox, writer Liz Plank said, the phrase was "the feminist rallying cry that Hillary Clinton needed."

A Janet Jackson fan immediately went into action and spliced footage of the debate into a video of her 1986 song "Nasty."

Clinton herself brushed off the comment. "I just didn't pay any attention to that," she said after the debate.

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Merriam Webster said "hombre" and "nasty" both topped its list of the most-searched words during the debate — as did "ombre," an old card game, and "ombré," a type of hair style that involves colors fading into each other. The dictionary cited uses of the phrase "bad hombre" as far back as the 19th century.

The memes also quickly gained steam on the online marketplace. Some of the craftspeople who sell merchandise on Etsy were primed to take advantage of an election that tends to offer up memes on a daily basis.

Ginger Knight of Philadelphia, who described herself as "not really that political," said she was more focused on the Republican nominee, reading Facebook statuses to see which of Trump's phrases were catching on with other users. "And I just started making word buttons," she said.

She made a "bad hombres" button, a "nasty woman" button and a "rigged" button, among others. They've been selling "every couple of minutes" she said.

Laura Brittain, another Etsy user and a Democrat from North Carolina, said that her source for quotes most likely to sell well on Etsy came from her teenage daughter.

"If we're watching the debate and something comes up and our 17-year-old daughter keeps bringing it up, we usually make a shirt or make something," she said.

"Last night she just kept saying, 'He reminds me of an angry Cheeto,'" she said of Trump.

While she was planning to vote for Clinton, Brittain said, she wasn't particularly enthusiastic.

Others saw their use of Trump's comments as a form of political expression. Erin Boyd of Bellingham, Washington, who has been on Etsy for about a decade, made her own version of the "nasty woman" T-shirt.

"I don't usually make meme-type shirts," she said. "But in this election, you just can't not. It's so easy because there have been so many amazing quotes from Mr. Trump."

Boyd, a registered Democrat, sold out of the shirts overnight and re-listed them Thursday morning, interrupting a phone conversation to remark that she had just sold another one.

"They're selling like literal hot cakes," she said. "It's insane."

She said this was a particularly compelling election for women given the contrast between the two candidates, and that she planned on voting for Clinton.

"We have a woman running for president. Her opponent is a man from whom we can get quotes like" this and "'such a nasty woman,'" she said, before pausing to think.

"It's sort of like the high and low of being a woman in America," she added.