Queer street

Queer street is a colloquial term referring to a person being in some difficulty, most commonly financial. It is often associated with Carey Street, where London's bankruptcy courts were once located.

Origins

The term appears in 1811 in the Lexicon Balatronicum: A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence, an updated version of Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. It is defined therein as:

Although often being associated with the Carey Street bankruptcy courts, which also lends its name to a similar phrase, the term Queer Street appears to predate the courts' move to Carey Street from Westminster in the 1840s.

The folk etymology associating Queer Street and Carey Street has persisted and led to a number of explanations for its supposed origins: that 'queer' may be a corruption of 'Carey' or that it is a transmutation of the German language term Querstrasse (street running off at a right angle), the latter origin being akin to that of the idiom "orthogonal to" in the sense of "conceptually or logically incompatible with."