Feisty is a word John Kelly from Artane has been hearing more and more recently on television sports programmes, he tells me. It is often applied to quarrelsome, overpaid footballers and is by no means opprobrious. Indeed, it is deemed no bad thing to have a feisty player on a team.
An interesting word this. It had almost become obsolete in English by the time the great migrations took place to the US and Canada. To this day, in the Midland dialects and in the Deep South, feist is one of the names given to a small mongrel dog. But to the word's origin.
By the 15th century the participle fisting was common in expressions used to describe a dog: a fisting cur, a fisting hound etc. This fisting is found as early as 1000 and it must have had its origin in a verb, fistan, in Old English. Anyway, fist, pronounced feist, was known as both a noun and a verb by the mid-13th century. It meant to break wind.
The word petard is also associated with this unsociable act. You'll remember that Shakespeare had "For 'tis the sport to have the enginer Hoist with his own petar" in Hamlet. The petar(d) was an explosive device, shaped like a barrel and filled with gunpowder. Shakespeare's "enginers", the petardiers, would bring the petard up the a castle's gates at night, light the fuse and run like hell. The exploding petard would blow the gates to bits, but many of the petardiers, not being acquainted with Newton's Third Law of Motion, got the full force of the bomb's casing if they didn't get out of the way in time, and were, as the man said, "hoist on their own petar". This was a straight borrowing from the French petard, itself from the French verb peter, to break wind, from the Latin pedere, same thing.
The 17th century funk is another word associated with foul smells. It is thought to derive from a French dialect verb funkier, which means to give off smoke. In the 19th century the adjective funky appeared to described a place or a person having a bad odour.
Sometime in the 1950s American jazzmen began applying the adjective to earthy, uncomplicated music that had, if I'm not mistaken, a bluesy tinge to it. The meaning was immediately extended to "in", swinging, fashionable - quite a journey from its origins.