For some time now, some of my on-line friends have advised me to provide a version of CassidySlangScam without the invective aimed at Cassidy and his supporters. In response to that advice, I am working on providing a glossary of the terms in Cassidy’s ludicrous book How The Irish Invented Slang with a short, simple and business-like explanation of why Cassidy’s version is wrong.
Queer is of Germanic origin. It is related to the German quer meaning oblique, perverse or odd, and seems to have entered English via the Scots language.
Cassidy’s claim that it derives from the Irish corr is ludicrous because its real derivation is known and corr is pronounced something like first syllable cor in the English word coral. It sounds nothing whatsoever like the English words queer or quare.
Here is a link to sound files of the word corr in the major dialects of Irish: