QUEAN

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Dr. Goodword
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QUEAN

Postby Dr. Goodword » Fri Aug 03, 2007 11:12 pm

• quean •

Pronunciation: kween • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun

Meaning: 1. A floozy, hussy, harlot, slut, slattern, strumpet, tart, or any bold, impudent girl or woman. 2. An effeminate male homosexual (not queen). 3. (Scotland only!) A young girl.

Notes: What a difference an A makes! The semantic spread between queen and quean could not be greater: from a woman of the highest repute to one of the lowest. The adjective queanish (adverb queanishly) means "like a quean, in a queanly manner". Queanry is the stuff queans are made of.

In Play: Today's lexical golden oldie can lead to some very humorous misunderstandings if not used with care: "Heidi Fleiss was the queen of Hollywood queans until her arrest." The possibilities for wordplay are endless: "La cage aux folles is a hilarious movie set in a night club that sponsors a nightly beauty quean pageant."

Word History: In Old English cwene "woman" and cwen "queen" were pronounced differently even though they were derived from the same Old Germanic word, kweniz. The root of this word goes back to Proto-Indo-European gwen- "woman" which emerged in Greek as gyne "woman", the root of the borrowed English word, gynecology. In Russian the same PIE word became žena "wife" and, in Persian, zan "woman". In Irish Gaelic the same root became bean "woman" which is used with sídhe "fairy" in the phrase bean sídhe "wailing female spirit of death". English collapsed this phrase into one word: banshee.
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Stargzer
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Postby Stargzer » Sat Aug 04, 2007 9:20 am

Defnition 2 doesn't appear in the Good Doctor's beloved AHD, but the Online Etymology Dictionary gives two different dates for the first recorded use of quean (1935) and queen (1924) in that sense. In the AHD, queasy follows quean. In some cases that seems appropriate. :wink:
Regards//Larry

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Ferrus
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Postby Ferrus » Sat Aug 04, 2007 5:11 pm

After seeing this word I assumed it was an architectural term till I forgot that the said word is 'quoin'.

A very good word indeed - is the second meaning of rather more recent provenance?
"Words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think."
Lord Byron


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