Up to the knees in sleaze. History and meaning of the word sleaze.

Sleaze has been around a long time. I mean the word, not political corruption or sexual shenanigans, which are as old as time. Recently it’s been prominent in the news thanks to Boris Johnson and the wallpapergate scandal, caused by his bidie-in’s voracious redecorating appetite.1

A four-minute read.

The Atlantic supposedly divides sleaze neatly into two distinct senses – though the reality is more nuanced. In Britain it tends to mean ‘corruption’, with sex optionally involved. Oxford online defines sleaze accordingly as ‘immoral, sordid, and corrupt behaviour or activities’, which covers all the bases. In the U.S. it’s more often a personal reproach: an American sleaze is ‘a sordid, corrupt, or immoral person’, though that meaning is known this side of the pond as well.

Sleaze is much more common in British than American English. What that says about our respective real worlds I don’t pretend to know.

Sleaze goes hand in hand with corruption. I mean linguistically, not factually: corruption is sleaze’s most frequent noun bedfellow, followed a long way off by sex and then scandal. Sleaze, I maintain, possesses excellent mouthfeel – as the wine buffs and foodies would style it. Which is why it rears its ugly head with greater than average frequency – statistically speaking – in journalese. If it had a colour, it would be orange. If it had a voice, it would sound loud and brassy. Mouthfeelwise again, there’s something louche about that sl-, which links sleaze with slime, sludge, slurry, slush, not to mention slut and slattern. (Anatoly Liberman discusses the negative connotations of sl– words here.)

When did the word sleaze appear?

The earliest OED citation is from that organ of civility The Listener (Alas, who now remembers it?).

For all its brazen sleaze, Soho is a pretty fair working model of what a city neighbourhood should be.

1967 Listener 14 Sept. 326/2  

That date chimes with my recollection of when certain school chums and I were fascinated by its novelty in the newspapers, though in connection with what long-ago scandal I can’t recall. ‘Up to the knees in sleaze’, is a phrase that rings down the dusty corridors of memory, though whether it was a tabloid masthead or a jingle we invented I have no idea.

It took until 1986 for it to appear in Hansard in connection with – guess what – financial sleaze related to the Conservative government’s privatisation programme. As it happens, the most common prenominal word for sleaze is Tory, though the Labour Party is not unsullied.

Its other meaning, of ‘a person of low moral standards’ as the OED rather starchily defines it, is first recorded by Jonathon Green in his magisterial Green’s Dictionary of Slang from 1971 from a slang journal as ‘a sexually promiscuous woman’.

The OED concurs with his next meaning of ‘unappealing seedy person’ from 1976:

When I made the mistake of calling them ‘sleazy’ to their faces, their reaction was outrage. ‘Don’t call me a sleaze,’ said Miss Currie.

1976   Telegraph (Brisbane) 3 Aug. 10/3  

Next, in 1980 from the U.S. comes the meaning of ‘Political corruption or impropriety; corrupt or scandalous behaviour by public officials’, which, it seems to me, is very much the meaning it has long had in the UK.

Public perceptions may lump all 535 House and Senate members together in a great ball of sleaze, but in the real world of Capitol Hill it is not that way.

1980   Washington Post 4 Feb. a6/1 

Although this use started in the U.S., it now seems particularly British. So much so, in fact, that an American was sufficiently puzzled by this meaning to query it with the doyenne of British/American differences, Professor Lynne Murphy.  

Where does the word sleaze come from?

It’s a back-formation from the adjective sleazy, which is not recent (1644) but originally described cloth that was ‘thin or flimsy in texture’ as the OED puts it. Sleazy figures in one of the earlier English dictionaries, Thomas Blount’s Glossographia of 1670:

Sleasie Holland, common people take to be all Holland, which is slight or ill-wrought.

(Holland here means a form of linen cloth.)

As to where sleazy comes from, the OED editors shrug their shoulders and tag it ‘of uncertain origin’.

It quickly developed an extended or figurative meaning, as in:

Their vain, and sleasy opinions, about Religion.
1648   N. Ward To Parliament at Westminster 26  

in a sense which the OED has not marked as ‘obsolete’ but presumably will when the team get round to revising it.

The OED dates the first written citation for sleazy meaning ‘squalid, sordid, disreputable’ to 1941, but Jonathon Green, antedates it to a 1930s U.S. quotation to which he assigns the meaning ‘of a person, unpleasant…distasteful’:

Al and his sleezy wife.
1937 ‘F. Bonnamy’ Death on a Dude Ranch (1953) 80

Two years earlier than that came the U.S. meaning ‘of a thing, dirty, run-down, decayed’ but it is not until 1972 according to Green that it appears in its sexualised meaning of ‘perverse’, again in the U.S. and in the form sleazo.

Death-trip [satanist] groups that must have provided powerful sleazo inputs into Manson.
E. Sanders Family 73

The earliest citation in the OED that links sleazy to sex is from Punch:

A kind of sleazy, leering sex for its own sake.

1958   Punch 27 Aug. 286/2  

What about its derivatives or word family?
Being a somewhat promiscuous word, it has engendered quite a brood:
sleazebag (1981)
sleazeball (1983)
sleazebucket (1983)
sleazehole (1986)
sleazemonger (1996)
sleazoid adj (1976)
sleazster (2000)

And then there is the verb to sleaze, which goes back to 1777, but is first cited in the OED as meaning ‘to move in a sleazy fashion’ in Punch:

Other plays, sleazing across the West End boards.
1964   Punch 30 Dec. 986/2  

I was reminded of sleaze and its story when I encountered sleazebag in the hallucinatorily brilliant Bad News by Edward St Aubyn. The protagonist, Patrick Melrose, a major-league drug user, is aflame with desire for his girlfriend’s friend Marianne, with whom he is having dinner. Her thoughts:

‘There he was drooling at her again. The green velvet dress was obviously a big hit. It made her angry to think of Debbie, who was crazy and ragged with love of this sleazeball (Marianne had made the mistake of calling him “a temporary aberration” at the beginning, but Debbie had forgiven her now that she wished it was true), of Debbie being rewarded with this would-be infidelity, no doubt as generalized as his insatiable appetite for drugs.’

1 The wallpaper used to redecorate the 11 Downing Street flat was claimed in the press to have cost £840 ($1160) a roll.

References:

“sleazy, adj.”. OED Online. March 2021. Oxford University Press. https://oed.com/view/Entry/181563 (accessed May 01, 2021).

“sleaze, n.”. OED Online. March 2021. Oxford University Press. https://oed.com/view/Entry/181557 (accessed May 01, 2021).

“sleaze, v.”. OED Online. March 2021. Oxford University Press. https://oed.com/view/Entry/181558 (accessed May 01, 2021).

“sleazy, adj.”.Green’s Dictionary of Slang. Digital Edition. 2021. https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/6wugg5q (accessed May 01, 2021).

“sleaze, n.”.Green’s Dictionary of Slang. Digital Edition. 2021. https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/mdiqr3q (accessed May 02, 2021).

Murphy, LM (2021) Sleaze. In: Separated by a Common Language. Available at: https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com (accessed May 02, 2021).

St Aubyn, E (2012) Bad News [1992]. London: Pam Macmillan, p.193.