Hello, using "queer" to mean "spoil or ruin" is outdated and informal. And "queer street" is also outdated and British—which means not everyone that speaks English may recognize it—as well. And sure, that F word can also mean that—which is also British and a (terrible) traditional practice in British public school with it first appearing in the late 17th century and abolished in the 20th century according to Wikipedia.

Unless you insist in using words with their archaic meanings, please simply replace them with phrases that readers that aren't British and 90 years old can understand.

Agreed, @Sercuz. I know of the practice you're referring to, and in the latter part of the 20th century, those boys were renamed "runners", from the original term. There are now no public schools in the UK which operate this practice, the last of them to remove it was Eton, if my memory serves me correctly.

In respect of the wiki though, it would be better to lose those terms entirely and bring the whole thing up to date. It's a long gone tradition, and with good reason too - as one old Rugbean mentioned on a website I'm a member of "Our fellow students are our equals, not our servants..."

I also agree. Words change meaning over time. And what was inoffensive in the past can be offensive now (or, occasionally, the other way round).

"Queer" is a somewhat reclaimed word, but in other contexts it's still offensive. It's best to respect your audience by avoiding (mis)using it (I'd never heard the -street term, I had to look it up, despite being British.)

Indeed, @Sannse - as a speaker of English as a second language, a lot of British English words confused me so much. I've heard people use the Q word to describe feeling unwell ("I feel a bit Q this morning") and I didn't know what to make of it. I smoke, and a few times I've asked for an F word mentioned above, and when I lived in London, that drew some glares from people too.

It took me a few weeks to figure out that a butty was a sandwich, and that pop wasn't a noise, but a drink. English is one of the single most archaic languages in existence, and I applaud anyone who learns it well enough to understand it completely without errors!

Incidentally, the abuse filter just kicked me for "Profanity is not allowed", when I used the Q word and the F word in full... not sure what's going on there...

@DaneGeld It's probably the F word; the filter is a computer program, and therefore cannot see the context in which it was used. It just sees the word, sees that it's on a list of "banned" words, and just blocks it. It can't see things the way humans can. I've had that with the N word (not the N word: the other N word, the lookalike word with a totally different meaning), but unfortunately, there's nothing we can do about the Scunthorpe problem :(.

@AdamPlenty Ah, the Scunthorpe problem. I learned about that from Tom Scott on YouTube. A very odd situation, indeed. It's crazy to think that with so much tech at our hands, we can't teach a computer to forbid words on a case by case basis, and not open the door to blocking legitimate info by doing so...