Cantering Through Cant (18)

Queer has a rather pejorative meaning these days but in Francis Grose’s time, as revealed in his A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), it was used as an adjective to mean “base, roguish, bad, naught or worthless” and, by extension, “odd, uncommon”. As a verb to queer meant “to puzzle or confound” as in I have queered the full bottom, a slang term for puzzling a judge.

The dictionary is full of queers and here are just a few for your delectation.

Queer birds were “rogues relieved from prison, and returned to their old trade”, while queer bit-makers were coiners and a queer bluffer was “the master of a public house, the resort of rogues and sharpers, a cut-throat inn or alehouse keeper”. I’ve met a few of those in my time. Cole was money and so a queer cole maker was a “maker of bad money” and a queer cole fencer was one who passed off bad coinage. Queer roosters were a particular type of informer who pretended to be asleep but all the while listened to the conversations of thieves.

A queer cove was a rogue, a queer cuffin a justice of the peace, and a queer mort was a “diseased strumpet”. Amongst inanimate objects a queer degen was a brass or iron-hilted sword, a queer nab a felt or other type of poor hat, and queer kicks were an inferior sort of breeches.

The strangest, but perhaps the most ingenious, form of queer was the queer plungers. One of their number would throw himself into the river from which he was “rescued” by his accomplices and taken to the offices of the Humane Society for the recovery of drowned persons. For their bravery and enterprise, they would be each rewarded with a guinea from the coffers of the gullible society. The rescued man would tell a story that he had been driven to such desperate actions by the straitened circumstances in which he found himself and he too would be sent off with a few coins jingling in his soggy pocket.