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The OED dates this from the early twentieth century, with an initial quotation from The Los Angeles Times in 1914 which characterizes a club as “composed of the ‘queer’ people,” where “the ‘queer’ people have a good time” followed by a 1915 quotation from Arnold Bennett describing “An immense reunion of art students, painters, and queer people. Strange queer continues through into contemporary English, acquiring in the course of the eighteenth century an associated sense of feeling “out of sorts unwell faint, giddy.” The OED quotes from a 1750 novel: “All on a sudden, my Wife complained she was sick, and both myself and Sir Thomas found ourselves very queer and qualmish.” The major development is use of the term in the specific sense of, or relating to, homosexuals or homosexuality. The merging of the more or less distinct words is subsequently important.
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This bad queer (in early use often occurring as quire) seems to have been a different word, of unknown origin, from the strange queer, itself of uncertain origin, with which it gradually became identified after the end of the seventeenth century. Its sense of “strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric” is given an initial Oxford English Dictionary ( OED) date of 1513 thus John Bale in 1550 writes of chronicles that “contayne muche more truthe than their quere legendes.” There is then another sense, recorded as obsolete, with a date of 1567: that of queer as “bad contemptible, worthless untrustworthy, disreputable.” In this sense the word is used with reference especially to vagabonds and criminals, and eventually also applied to counterfeit coins and banknotes. The adjective queer poses etymological problems. How has the word “ queer” been reclaimed by the LGBTQ community? This adapted excerpt from Keywords for Today: A 21st Century Vocabulary explains its evolution.