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"There was no word spunk in Swedish until Pippi coined it (an event recently celebrated in this blog), but in English it has existed since at least the sixteenth century. It is surrounded by a host of equally obscure look-alikes (that is, obscure from the etymological perspective). To deal with them, I should remind our readers that English, like all the other Indo-European languages, is full of words in which initial s- looks like a gratuitous addition. It pretends to be a prefix but carries no meaning; it does not even make words more expressive. It appears and disappears at will, and no one knows its origin. Linguists call this enigmatic prop s mobile “movable s.” Therefore, when one deals with a suspicious item like spunk, the question arises: “Can it be related to punk?” And if punk has something to do with spunk, where do funk and fungus come in? Etymologists flounder in this net of homonyms and near synonyms, and, as we will see, did not succeed in extricating themselves."
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"First of all, let us examine all the senses of the words to be discussed below. Spunk means “spark” and “touchwood.” Touchwood is what becomes of wood when certain fungi convert it into a soft mass; once ignited, it can burn for hours like tinder. Touchwood is defined in dictionaries by means of its synonym tinder. “Spark” and “flammable substance” are compatible senses. Spunk “spirit, mettle” can be understood as a figurative extension of “tinder.” The slang sense “semen” (“not in delicate use,” as the OED said about such things in the past) is an obvious extension of “sprit, virility,” though one can say, “You are a spunk,” without overt sexual connotations (the verb to spunk is more explicit)."
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