Daddy Daze, 4/28/25

One of my favorite little linguistic quirks is the existence of true homonyms: when two separate words with different meanings and different origins evolve in a language until they happen to be pronounced and spelled the same way. That's what's going on here with the word funk, or more accurately the two words funk(s): the "be in a bad mood" word derives from a Scottish and Northern English word of uncertain but possibly Flemish origin that means "become afraid," whereas the "music to put you in good mood" word derives in slang from the sense (still in use today) of a funk as a bad smell, which in turn comes to English via French from the Latin verb for putting off smoke, fumigare. This is the sort of information I would convey to my baby, if I lived alone with my baby and had very little contact with the outside world and it drove me to a state of madness in which I believed that my baby's incoherent babbling noises constituted meaningful attempts to communicate that only I could understand.

Andy Capp, 4/28/25