Garfunkel

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Art Garfunkel is an American singer best known as the partner of Paul Simon in the folk-rock duo Simon & Garfunkel
2. A famous American vocalist who performed alongside Paul Simon in the 1960s and 1970s as part of the duo Simon & Garfunkel
3. The American singer whose high tenor harmonies with Paul Simon made the folk duo Simon & Garfunkel a celebrated act of the 1960s

Etymology: Yiddish "gorfinkl" meant "carbuncle," a painful boil or cluster of boils, and that is the word's first and most literal sense. English took the term from Yiddish and used it in slang, where it came to mean a pimple or spot on the skin, and it later shifted toward a more general sense of a nuisance or a sore spot. The word is a clear case of a borrowed Yiddish noun passing into English through informal speech, so it has no Latin or Greek ancestry to trace. Its path from a medical term for a festering swelling to a common and mildly insulting noun shows how slang borrowings often keep a vivid physical image while losing the seriousness of the original.