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• oleaginous •

Pronunciation: o-lee-æ-ji-nês • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Adjective

Meaning: 1. Oily, greasy; containing, like, or related to oil. 2. Unctuous, obsequious, overly suave and solicitous.

Notes: Although the preferred noun from this word is oleaginousness, its length and silly sound lead me to favor the rarer but more pronounceable oleaginity. The adverb is oleaginously which can be used in many ways: the ring slipped off her finger oleaginously, i.e. as if greased.

In Play: A feature of county fairs back when I was a boy was a competition called the greased pole competition in which boys tried to climb to the top of an oleaginous flag pole. Those were the days of oleaginous duck-tail hair styles held in place with an ample slathering of Brylcreem hair oil. But characters and personalities may be oily, too, and thank heaven, we have a longer word than oily for such: "Some oleaginous traveling salesman sold poor Miss Judge a No. 4 shelf stretcher and promised to deliver it in two weeks."

Word History: Today's Good Word started out as Latin oleagineus "of or relating to the olive tree" but within a few hundred years its meaning had shifted to "of or related to oil". This adjective was based on the nouns olea "olive tree" (variant of oliva) and oleum "olive oil". Does oleum ring a bell? Yes, linoleum was originally a company name coined by British inventor Frederick Walton from linum "flax, linen" + oleum "oil". The original product of the Linoleum Company (founded 1864) was a floor covering made of canvas reinforced by hardened linseed oil. The word came to refer to the floor covering itself around 1878. (No amount of oil can pry loose the real name of the mysterious Grogie of the Alpha Agora but it was he who suggested today's Good Word.)

Try Vitalis ("no more greasy kid stuff!").

My cousin and I, as we vied for the most impressive duck tail, found Vitalis didn't hold as well and tended to drip if you put enough on for it to hold at all.

It is amazing how much of the knowledge we accumulate eventually becomes defunct.

Try Vitalis ("no more greasy kid stuff!").

That reminds me of a bad joke. ("Don't use that greasy kid stuff on your hare!") Which reminds me of another bad one, about the home for old comedians, where all jokes are told by their number. Then there's the old Bill Cosby routine about the two athletes comparing combs in a commercial ...

Stargzer's consciousness goes streaming along ...

I remember this word being used by The Times to describe George Galloway's conduct in his rant to U.S. Senate when questioned over the oil-for-food scandal. I was rather impressed to see there was someone there with even a glimmer of humour.