Christgau Word of the Day: Lubricious

This photo covers both definitions of
the word lubricious. And then some.

One of several features I plan to include in this blog is the Christgau Word of the Day. (No, I don't plan on having a Christgau Word of the Day every day.)

The point of this feature is to find words, usually those classified by the less-literate (like myself) as "S.A.T. words" (regardless of whether they would actually appear on an S.A.T. exam), that Christgau uses and which might be one reason his reviews infuriate so many people.

For this post I found the Christgau Word of the Day by somewhat happy accident. I was using Google as a spell check, as I often do out of laziness because the search engine rarely lets me down in the "Did you mean to use this word which you spelled incorrectly, dummy?" department. The word I was looking for, in order to pull up the definition for which I make a screenshot, was lugubrious, but the stew of letters I entered returned a different word, a word that sounded pretty cool and Christgau-like, so I went with that instead.

That word is lubricious.

Such a delicious word. If you click on the little audio button next to the word above (on the search result, not on the screenshot), you'll hear the word pronounced correctly by a vanilla radio-announcer guy and not, alas, Kathleen Turner. What a waste.

The Online Etymology Dictionary notes that, at least in English, as the two meanings can be traced to the middle of the 17th century. The "offensively displaying or intended to arouse sexual desire" definition sounds rather subjective, though; it could mean anything from wearing too much Polo cologne before heading out to a club to wearing no pants to said club.

Anyway, I'd assumed that Christgau would use a word like lubricious, and I was correct.