'Funky'

'Funky', much like the word 'genius', is a word that has been so overused and misappropriated these last few years, that it almost has no relevance anymore. Everything these days is, apparently, 'funky': music, food, clothes, pubs, make-up, furniture, wallpaper - even hair. I was at a hairdresser's the other week and some guy - who was at least fifty, and very 'straight' in appearance - was discussing the particular ways in which his new style needed to be "really messed up and funky".

I'm actually at the point where I'm now waiting for banks and building societies to get in on the act and start selling themselves in terms of their percieved 'funkiness'. I picture it this way: set to Curtis Mayfield's Pusherman, a young be-stubbled, bed-haired bank employee (let's call him Rufus) sashays into an homogenized high street building society, swigging down a Café Nero latte. You see, the subtext is that he's been out 'partying' all night (I'll come back to annoying verbage at some point) and, like the rest of us in this hyper-immediate, busy postmodern world, he needs a quick, effective, stimulant. Better that than, say, getting a couple of hours sleep: after all, he's 'funky', and the funk don't sleep. In the next scene we encounter Rufus engaging in some mild flirting with a young, also 'funky' female colleague at the (oh yes) coffee machine. Eventually, our hero arrives at his desk - iMac, glass partitions, pop art print on wall = check _ where we find him easily communicating some evidently hugely interesting banking information to a couple of equally 'funky' customers (each wearing sunglasses, beanie hats and carrying record bags, and also drinking from Café Nero paper cups). Cut to: a close-up of Rufus' enormous gold retro Casio digital watch, and its red LED displaying the time: '18:00'. At this, Rufus grabs his coat and says to an older 'stuffy' colleague in full-on pinstripe attire: "laters Alan... time to party". Cut to: Rufus in a nightclub, leaning back at a seventy-five degree angle against a burgundy coloured leather DJ booth. He is swigging bottled lagers with the club's DJ who, get this, is the beanie hatted customer from earlier in the day. The advert fades out over footage of Rufus and his DJ friend furtively sneaking into a toilet cubicle together, and the closing caption reads: 'yeah, we may be fiscal, but that don't mean we ain't funky with it. Dig!?'.

Please, everybody, just ease off with it, will you!?. I'm OK with people using the term in relation to music, so long as that music is actually funky: and if you don't know the difference; if you don't know what 'the funk' is, then you really shouldn't be using the word as an adjective. Full stop.