funk [E17th] People started using funk and funky in musical contexts during the 1950s: before that, funky was a Black English expression that meant ‘worthless, bad’, which reversed its meaning in the same way as *bad and *wicked to mean ‘excellent’. In the early 17th century, though, funk meant ‘a musty smell’, of unknown origin. Funk meaning ‘a state of panic or anxiety’ was Oxford University slang in the mid 18th century, in the phrase in a blue funk. It too is of uncertain origin but could refer to the slang sense of funk as ‘tobacco smoke’, or it could be from an old Flemish word fonck, ‘disturbance, agitation’.