different between queer vs idiosyncratic

English

Alternative forms

• qwer (Bermuda)

Etymology

Attested since about 1510, from Scots, perhaps from Middle Low German (Brunswick dialect) queer (“oblique, off-center”) (also compare with German quer (“diagonally”)), from Proto-Germanic *þwerhaz, from Proto-Indo-European *terk?- (“to turn, twist, wind”). Compare Latin torqueo. Related to thwart. Began to be used to describe gay people in the late 1800s, see usage notes for more.

Pronunciation

• (General American) enPR: kwîr, IPA^(key): /kw??/
• (Received Pronunciation) enPR: kwîr, IPA^(key): /kw??/
• Rhymes: -??(?)

Adjective

queer (comparative queerer, superlative queerest)

1. (dated outside Scotland) Weird, odd or different; whimsical. [from 16th c.]
   • 1865, Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

     “I wish I hadn’t cried so much!” said Alice, as she swam about, trying to find her way out. “I shall be punished for it now, I suppose, by being drowned in my own tears! That will be a queer thing, to be sure! However, everything is queer to-day.”

   • 1877, Ulysses S. Grant, page 252, The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant: November 1, 1876–September 30, 1878

     One thing has struck me as a bit queer. During my two terms of office the whole Democratic press, and the morbidly honest and 'reformatory' portion of the Republican press, thought it horrible to keep U.S. troops stationed in the Southern States, and when they were called upon to protect the lives of negroes–as much citizens under the Constitution as if their skins were white–the country was scarcely large enough to hold the sound of indignation belched forth by them for some years. Now, however, there is no hesitation about exhausting the whole power of the government to suppress a strike on the slightest intimation that danger threatens.

   • 1885, David Dixon Porter, page 274, Incidents and Anecdotes of the Civil War

     It looked queer to me to see boxes labeled "His Excellency, Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America." The packages so labeled contained Bass ale or Cognac brandy, which cost "His Excellency" less than we Yankees had to pay for it. Think of the President drinking imported liquors while his soldiers were living on pop-corn and water!

   • 1927, J. B. S. Haldane, “Possible Worlds” in Possible Worlds and Other Papers, London: Chatto & Windus,^{[5], [6]}

     Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

2. (Britain, informal, dated) Slightly unwell (mainly in "to feel queer"). [from 18th c.]
3. (Britain, slang) Drunk.
4. (colloquial, sometimes derogatory) Homosexual. [from 19th c.]
5. (colloquial, sometimes derogatory) Not heterosexual, or not cisgender: homosexual, bisexual, asexual, transgender, etc.
6. (broadly) Pertaining to sexual or gender behaviour or identity which does not conform to conventional heterosexual or cisgender norms, assumptions etc. [from 20th c.]
   • 1999, Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, Routledge 2002, preface to 1999 edition:

     If gender is no longer to be understood as consolidated through normative sexuality, then is there a crisis of gender that is specific to queer contexts?

Usage notes

• Queer, in the sense of "gay" or "non-heterosexual", has gone in and out of use as a pejorative and as a self-identifier a number of times: it began to be used to describe gay people in the late 1800s (e.g. in an 1894 letter by John Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry), and became more widespread in the US and became used as a self-identifier by American gay men by the 1910s, continuing into the 1950s, though by the 1940s younger ones considered it pejorative and preferred gay, which had been in used since the 1930s, and had come by the 1950s to encompass the whole LGBT community. Queer began to be reclaimed as a neutral or positive descriptor by the 1980s, at first most prominently by those who wanted to distinguish themselves from gay-identified people they felt had become too conservative and assimilationist. Some other people oppose the term as being still pejorative, or too radical, too informal, or too technical. The pejorative applied mainly to those assigned male at birth who were perceived as homosexual or effeminate; the reclaimed term is used by people of any sex or gender. Sometimes, the word refers only to nonheterosexual people and sexuality (and thus, speakers may contrast e.g. "queer trans women" with "straight trans women"), while at other times the word includes noncisgender people and is analogous to LGBT. (Compare genderqueer.)
• See also Wikipedia.
• The word queer is still in regular, everyday use in Scotland in its original meaning of strange or weird.

Synonyms

• (weird, odd or different): See Thesaurus:strange
• (unwell): See Thesaurus:diseased
• (homosexual): See Thesaurus:homosexual
• (unconventional sexual behavior):

Derived terms

Descendants

• ? German: queer
• ? Swedish: queer

Translations

Noun

queer (plural queers)

1. (colloquial, sometimes derogatory) A person who is or appears homosexual, or who has homosexual qualities.
2. (colloquial, sometimes derogatory) A person of any non-heterosexual sexuality or sexual identity.
3. (colloquial, sometimes derogatory) A person of any genderqueer identity.
4. (definite, with "the", informal, archaic) Counterfeit money.
   • 1913, Rex Stout, Her Forbidden Knight, 1997 Carroll & Graf edition, ?ISBN, page 133:

     You're shoving the queer.

   Synonyms: funny money, snide

Usage notes

• See the notes on the adjective (above) for more on the meaning of the term.
• Regarding the use of the term as a noun, compare the usage notes about gay.

Synonyms

• (homosexual person): See Thesaurus:homosexual person or Thesaurus:male homosexual

Hypernyms

• LGBTQ, QUILTBAG

Derived terms

Translations

Verb

queer (third-person singular simple present queers, present participle queering, simple past and past participle queered)

1. (transitive, dated) To render an endeavor or agreement ineffective or null.
   • 1955, Rex Stout, "When a Man Murders...", in Three Witnesses, October 1994 Bantam edition, ?ISBN, page 78:

     I was a lot more apt to queer it than help it.

   Synonym: invalidate

2. (Britain, dialect, dated) To puzzle.
   • 1887, G. W. Appelton, A Terrible Legacy: A Tale of the South Downs, London: Ward and Downey, Chapter II, page 12, [8]:

     "But lor-a-mussy, Jacob, how could a woman get away from here with all her boxes in the middle of the night?"

     "That's what queered me," and Spink slowly shook his head, "and queered a good many; for of course it got newsed about […] "

   • 1894, Ivan Dexter, Talmud: A Strange Narrative of Central Australia, published in serial form in Port Adelaide News and Lefevre's Peninsula Advertiser (SA), Chapter III, [9]:

     "Where do you come from?" Stanley queered.

3. (slang, dated) To ridicule; to banter; to rally.
4. (slang, dated) To spoil the effect or success of, as by ridicule; to throw a wet blanket on; to spoil.
   • 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, Book Two, Chapter IV, pages 270-271, [10]:

     "Food is what queered the party. We ordered a big supper to be sent up to the room about two o'clock. Alec didn't give the waiter a tip, so I guess the little bastard snitched."

   • 1926, D. H. Lawrence, "Glad Ghosts" in The Complete Short Stories, Penguin, 1977, Vol. 3, page 678:

     Well, then I got buried—shell dropped, and the dug-out caved in—and that queered me. They sent me home.

5. (social sciences) To reevaluate or reinterpret (a work) with an eye to sexual orientation and/or to gender, as by applying queer theory.
   • 2003, Marcella Althaus-Reid, The Queer God, page 9:

     If I go, for instance, to the history of the church in Latin America, and decide to queer the history of the Jesuitic Missions, I may find that, in many ways, the missions were more sexual than Christian.

   • 2006, Carla Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern (page 80)

     Jonathan Goldberg further explores the implications of queering history in his essay in the same volume.

   • 2013, Mark Davidson, Deborah Martin, Urban Politics: Critical Approaches, SAGE (?ISBN), chapter 8:

     We might say that there has been a ‘queering’ of urban studies insofar as the metropolitan lives, subcultures and social movements of gays and lesbians are now seen as valid objects of study.

Derived terms

Translations

Adverb

queer (comparative more queer, superlative most queer)

1. Queerly.

Translations

References

• queer at OneLook Dictionary Search
• queer in Keywords for Today: A 21st Century Vocabulary, edited by The Keywords Project, Colin MacCabe, Holly Yanacek, 2018.
• queer in The Century Dictionary, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911.

French

Etymology

From English queer.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /kwi?/

Adjective

queer (invariable)

1. queer (not conforming to traditional sexuality)

German

Etymology 1

Borrowed from English queer.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /kvi???/

Adjective

queer (not comparable)

1. (colloquial) queer
   • 2019, metamorphosen 23 – Queer: Magazin für Literatur und Kultur, metamorphosen im Verbrecher Verlag (?ISBN), page 5:

     Die nachvollziehbare Gegenwehr macht queer zu einer immer verbisseneren Chiffre für eine vermeintlich klar abgegrenzte Identität: anti-rassistisch, anti-kapitalistisch, radikal. QUEER IST UTOPISTISCH. Bin ich queer genug?

Declension

Etymology 2

Adjective

queer

1. Alternative form of quer

Declension

Adverb

queer

1. Alternative form of quer

Further reading

• “queer” in Duden online

Polish

Etymology

From English queer, from Scots, perhaps from Middle Low German (Brunswick dialect) queer, from Proto-Germanic *þwerhaz, from Proto-Indo-European *terk?-.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /kwir/

Noun

queer m inan (indeclinable)

1. queerness (quality of being queer, in the sense of not conforming to sexual or gender norms)

Derived terms

• (adjective) queerowy

Further reading

• queer in Wielki s?ownik j?zyka polskiego, Instytut J?zyka Polskiego PAN
• queer in Polish dictionaries at PWN

English

Etymology

From idiosyncrasy +? -ic.

Adjective

idiosyncratic (comparative more idiosyncratic, superlative most idiosyncratic)

1. Peculiar to a specific individual; eccentric.
   • 1982, Michael Walsh, "Music: A Fresh Falstaff in Los Angeles," Time, 26 April:

     British Director Ronald Eyre kept the action crisp; he was correctly content to execute the composer's wishes, rather than impose a fashionably idiosyncratic view of his own.

Derived terms

• idiosyncratical
• idiosyncraticity

Related terms

• idiosyncrasy

Translations

Further reading

• idiosyncratic at OneLook Dictionary Search