Funk

QFrom Tim McGowan, Minneapolis, USA: Why does the wordfunk have so many different meanings? Are they at all related in some distant past, or have they just grown up spontaneously and independently? I first learned offunk when I was growing up (I was born in America in ’63), and then it wasfunky, meaning cool or groovy (I thought). Then I learnedfunk was a style of music, and only a few years ago I learned (from Julia Louis-Dreyfus on TV’sSeinfeld) that it can also mean smelly. It didn’t help to look it up in the dictionary; there I learned thatfunk can be a state of abject terror. Groovy. Stench. Blues. Horror. Are there any connections that can be drawn between these diverse meanings?

A Truly a word for all seasons.

Let’s start with “smell”, which is the oldest sense offunk, dating from the early seventeenth century. It’s suggested it may come from the French dialect verbfunkier, to blow smoke on a person or annoy them with smoke, a word that’s probably based on Latinfumus, smoke (and is yet another example of a useful term that’s missing from English). Instances usually refer to air thick with tobacco smoke (some readers may think offug in the same sense, but the two words are not connected). Though it was known in Britain, early examples came from America, and it stayed active there long after it had gone out of use over here.

The sense of abject fear or cowardice is about a century less old, first being recorded in 1743. It may have appeared first as Oxford University slang. It is usually said that it is a distinct word to the earlier sense, deriving instead from an obsolete Flemish wordfonck, fear. (Despite the weight of authority behind this, I can’t help feeling that there was some association with the smell of fear in there somewhere.) Whatever its source, that sense stands alone and isn’t connected with any of the others, thoughblue funk is directly linked. (In Britain ablue funk is a state of panic or great fear, while in the US it refers more to a state of dejection or depression.)

However, the modern sense of a musical genre and the Black English termfunky for something excellent both derive from the surviving American sense offunk for a bad smell. The wordfunky was around in the 1920s to refer to an obnoxious smell, especially to refer to a person who smelled bad, say of sweat. However, it is certainly older than that.

Several subscribers pointed out that the blues songFunky Butt, which is associated with Buddy Bolden, is known from around the beginning of the twentieth century. Anne Hegerty wrote “At least a hundred years ago there was a dance hall in New Orleans whose official name was Kinney’s Hall or McKenna’s Hall (sources differ) but which was known to local jazz and ragtime musicians and dancers as Funky Butt Hall (ie Smelly Bottom Hall). Buddy Bolden used to play there, and his career ended in 1906”.

Whatever its origins,funky was later transferred in Black English to refer to somebody or something objectionable or worthless. By a process common in Black English, by the end of the 1930sfunky was being applied to things that were satisfying, impressive, or generally approved of (think ofwicked andbad, two other examples of this kind of deliberate inversion). The music sense — unpretentious, down to earth, rooted in the blues — turns up in the early 1950s as a further evolution of meaning that could consciously hark back to the Buddy Bolden song. The nounfunk in this sense is a back formation fromfunky.

Movatterモバイル変換

Funk