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A
Straight Dope Classic from Cecil's storehouse of human knowledge14-Feb-1992
Dear Cecil:
You are really cool when it comes to blowing the cobwebs off old words and phrases and
telling us what they mean. But can you do the same with some new stuff? What does
"funky" really mean? I don't think your most unabridged tome will have an
answer. You may have to ask Don Cornelius. --Roger K., Dallas
Cecil replies:
Thanks for the advice, son, but you're dealing with a professional. It seems clear funky
originally meant smelly. The question is, smelling of what? The Oxford English
Dictionary takes the demure view that funky meant "moldy," although it
notes that "funk" has often been used to mean tobacco smoke and may derive from
the Latin fumar, to smoke. By one account funky was applied to the smoky interior of jazz
clubs and the somewhat ripe smell of the denizens thereof, from there was extended to the
music, and finally acquired its current meaning of "hip in a down-and-dirty sort of
way." (Funk, by the way, dates back to 1623--new it's not.)
That's the family-newspaper version. A less respectable view has it that funk is "the
pungent odor given off by the sexually aroused female" (The Dictionary of the
Teenage Revolution and Its Aftermath, 1983). Believe what you will. I take no sides.
One last thing: funk in the sense of fear or panic, e.g., "he was in a blue
funk," is a completely separate word deriving from the Flemish fonck, fear.
YOU SAY IT'S FUNKY, I SAY IT STINKS
Dear Cecil:
Re the origins of "funky": In Flash of the Spirit, his brilliant
exploration of the sacred in African art, music, and dance, anthropologist/art historian
Robert Farris Thompson proposes an alternative etymology for funky that also illuminates
the word's longtime association with "smelly":
"The slang term `funky' ... seems to derive from the Ki-Kongo lu-fuki, `bad body
odor.' ... Both jazzmen and Bakongo use funky and lu-fuki to praise persons for the
integrity of their art, for having `worked out' to achieve their aims.... This Kongo sign
of exertion is identified with the positive energy of a person. Hence `funk' in American
jazz parlance can mean earthiness, a return to fundamentals."
This by no means negates the "sexually aroused female" theory of the
word's origin, for the odor of a woman in heat is symbolic of "positive energy"
in its most primitive form. --Cree M., New York
Cecil replies:
This bad body odor = artistic integrity thing might fly with jazz folk, Cree. But don't
try it out on your wife.
--CECIL ADAMS
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