The Weaponizing of ‘Slime’

When James Comey was described as a slimeball¸ lexicographers and word fanatics ran off to their reference sources. Was the term properly written as one word or two? Or, thinking topologically, was slime naturally spherical?

By now these are trivial points. Slime has been weaponized.

The pronouncement, which has once again reset the term ad hominem, was of course the White House response to the publication of the former FBI director’s memoir, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership.

(On at least one score, lexicographers and word fanatics breathed a sigh of relief. Whatever else Comey’s book might have to say, at least the serial comma was properly installed in the subtitle.)

Over at Merriam-Webster, inquiries for this particular word reportedly jumped by “60,000 percent,” which is percentage-ese for “there were 600 times as many queries about this word as we normally get.” Which is a lot of queries.

Merriam-Webster decodes the term slimeball as a “morally repulsive or odious person.”

This definition may not help: The contemporary reader may wonder what the terms odious and morally might mean in contemporary America, person having already been legally defined as a business corporation only much smaller.

Back to slimeball and the curiosity concerning the person who used the term and the person about whom it was used.

A compendious essay by the indefatigable Ben Zimmer appeared almost instantly in The Atlantic. Its title: “‘Slime Ball’ Is Trump’s Ooziest Insult.’”

The essay is so generously larded with explanatory references to slime — from medieval usages to the appearance of one Chevy Slyme in the hardly-ever-read Martin Chuzzlewit — with assists from the likes of Jonathon Green and Nicholson Baker — that I tread here with trepidation into the annals of slime and ooziness. So herewith some footnotes to that piece, with special reference to ooze.

Milton’s drowned Lycidas, having sunk beneath the watery floor and now enjoying postmaterial bliss, laves his “oozy locks” with “nectar pure,” which always always makes me think of conditioner. (“Split ends and oozy locks got you down? Not with Clairol’s Nectar Pure.”)

In Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady, Professor Higgins must pass off Eliza Doolittle as a lady of unidentified aristocratic origin at a ball, a challenge that sets Professor Zoltan Karpathy on her track. It’s a glorious evening. In an irresistible couplet that should be a warning to all us academic types, one professor recounts another professor’s research method: “Oozing charm from every pore / He oiled his way around the floor.”

Karpathy gets it wrong, and Higgins is delighted. Eliza has performed her function as a pedagogical marionette, even if she could have danced all night.

Zoltan Karpathy is the lighter side of slimy, but the oozing reminds us that his intentions are gelatinous.

Recent events convince me that I can only raise the level of the national conversation by invoking children’s entertainment.

Readers of Lingua Franca entrusted with children during the 1990s may remember Splat! — an endlessly entertaining moment from Nickelodeon television when a contestant was willingly covered with green slime. Online chat suggests that the slime was composed of vanilla pudding with green food coloring. Slime could be about safely anarchic joy.

It certainly was for SpongeBob SquarePants, that patron saint of silliness. Slime him and he absorbs. Then SpongeBob gives one mighty self-squeeze, and the slime’s back on you.

The Nickelodeon folks, recognizing a good thing, licensed a kit for home use called the Nickelodeon Slime Cra-Z-Slimy Extravaganza Lab. You get to make your own slime, which remains joyfully, foolishly playful.

That use of Z in Cra-Z-Slimy is beyond the limits of this post, but if you’ve read this far you just might find yourself thinking of the current twitterstorm over Comey & Co as the Cra-Z-Slimy Extravaganza Lab of political discourse.

It would be one of the more genial ways of describing current events and the whirlwind of insult language in which we find ourselves, stickily, trapped.