In 1992, someone asked what the real meaning of funky was. And the answer was that ‘funky’ originally meant smelly, and it could have gotten itself applied to music as time went by. Maybe so, but I’m wondering if ‘funky music’ could have come from ‘defunctive music’, which means funereal music. Shakespeare speaks of ‘defunctive music’ in “The Phoenix and Turtle”. Well, it’s a long shot. Over, Pip.
Yes, PoppaSan, that’s the 1992 article. So my question today is whether ‘funky music’ originates from ‘defunctive music’. Pip.
Nope. It’s probably from a word in a West African language, meaning “smoky” or “body odor,” but referring to the special qualities or powers that certain people possess, made manifest through how their sweaty bodies smell.
Not likely, as defunctive comes from the Latin defunct to mean defunction or dying. No cites in the OED related to music.
While the word almost certainly comes from Black English, there is no evidence that it comes from a West African word. The earliest cites in the OED relating to funky and music are from a ragtime song “Funky Butt” or "Buddy Bolden’s Blues. Bolden was a Black coronet play and band leader in the first decade of the 20th Century.
True, the African connection is just one scholar’s speculation. More likely to be rooted in a European word (perhaps dialectal French, or Flemish) cognate to other words derived from Latin* fumus* (smoke) – even further back, from a Proto-European word that also led to Greek thumos (soul, mind) and English dust.
My personal (and completely uneducated) opinion is that the sexual reference is the correct one. Besides, *funk *rhymes with spunk, not to mention junk, so there you have it. QED.
Oh, all the experts pretty much agree it had quite sexual connotations by the time it appeared in Black American contexts 100 years ago. The only question is how much earlier these connotations went. Maybe way back – it’s reasonable to imagine ancient Romans, or even more ancient Proto-Indo-Europeans, feeling a link between “smoke,” an individual’s soul or mind (see the Greek meaning), and their sexy emanations. Attractive sweat, you could say.
There’s also the thought that another style of music, Jazz, is etymologically related to jism, which is also a word that means both semen and “vital energy”. So a word that means a different kind of emanation and also vital energy which shows in music wouldn’t be too far of a stretch for me.
“Funk” as a synonym of “pheromone”? It makes sense but etymology is tricky and what seems neat and sensible is often wrong, because a lot of language development is pretty arbitrary. Or at least unintuitive.