Quare
Strange, unusual, or peculiar - and, by a delicious twist, an intensifier meaning very or extremely. A word that holds two opposing senses at once and trusts the listener to know which is meant.
Etymology
An older spelling of queer that survived in Irish English long after standard English moved on. The pronunciation drifted with it: queer became /kwɪər/ in the south of England, but quare kept its longer, opener vowel - the same vowel you hear in square or fair. Recorded in print from the mid-eighteenth century; widespread by the nineteenth.
In a sentence
There's a quare cold to it tonight, isn't there?
He's a quare one, that fellow.
Quare kind of you to ask, but I'm grand altogether. - a polite refusal
Historical notes
While queer evolved into a clinical and later a contested term in standard English, quare held its older shape and stayed neutral. Its survival in Hiberno-English is partly an accident of geography and partly a small act of linguistic conservatism: the word the rest of the language gave up on stayed at home in Ireland and kept doing both jobs.
Alternate spellings
queer (archaic)
Sources
- Dolan, Terence Patrick. A Dictionary of Hiberno-English. Gill & Macmillan, 2004. · dictionary
- Macafee, Caroline. Concise Ulster Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 1996. · dictionary