quare

[George Thompson]

[the perp] said that he had always been a "quare" man until this morning, when he got drunk and took to the cross.
New York Morning Express, January 21, 1846, p. 7, col. 1

The OED has 2 meaning for quare (adjective): the first = "queer" -- this cites Brendan Behan's play The Quare Fellow, along with earlier passages, but does not mention that Behan explains (somewhere) that in English or Irish prisons, a "quare fellow" was a man awaiting his hanging (if I remember correctly, 40 years after reading it); the second evidently applies here, meaning "good, excellent", with the earliest citation coming from 1880, and the only citation that applies the word to a person is from 1996.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.
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