Thing To Be Today But Only In A Good Way: funky.

Ooh, ooh, ooh, as has been often remarked, the funky gibbon.

Are you funky today?

In the USA funky is quite likely to mean evil-smelling, so I hope you're not funky in that way, but here in Britain funky will probably mean new-styled, brash, and endearingly eccentric.

Of course sometimes funky means to do with funk music. It's all connected, you know.

By tobacco, actually.

Time to look out one of my sillier hats, I think.

Thing To Be Today But Only In A Good Way: funky. Funk was used in 1600s America to describe tobacco smoke. (The same word was used to mean to smoke tobacco, too.) Funk came from the Old French funkier, meaning to smoke, and eventually this gave rise to the idea of funky music: dirty, soulful, or earthy stuff like the early blues, and therefore something impossibly cool.