q
MANY, A GREAT deal (Ireland)
‘Tis quair things I have been seeing!’ declared a letter written from Ulster in 1805, but there was nothing odd about the correspondent’s experiences: he’d just had a good many of them. Whatever may have happened to queer (or as seen here in its regional spelling and pronunciation, quare) in the centuries that have followed, for those who choose it on the other side of the Irish Sea, the word is regularly used to refer to a large number, or as an intensifier. And so P. W. Joyce, in his guide English as We Speak It in Ireland (1910), refers to a day that was both ‘quare and hot’, encouraging him to get out there and enjoy it. Such a use of queer, which after all is almost invariably seen as a negative (originally by criminal beggars for whom it was the opposite of rum, meaning ‘good or excellent’), leads to what otherwise might seem rather odd descriptions: ‘She’s a quare nice old lady.’
a wimp; a fool (Liverpool)
The link between quilt, a synonym for counterpane or duvet, and a Liverpudlian term meaning someone foolish, is presumably a pun: both are in their own way ‘soft’. But it might be worth bearing in mind the English Dialect Dictionary’s definition of the noun as a ‘pimple, a boil, or a blister’, and of the verb as ‘to beat up’. The meanings of the noun, then, tend to give the idea of softness, while the verb makes the victim so.
See DON’T BE DAFT, and also ADDLE-HEADED, BARMY, DAFT, FOND, GORMLESS, SOFT
(of hands) wrinkled, shrivelled (Wiltshire)
A hundred years or so ago, if a woman’s hands had been immersed too long in the washtub, they were said to be quobbled, at least in the South-West. The word nicely fills the linguistic gap for the state of hands which, nowadays, have simply spent too long in the bath.