101 YEARS OLD AND STILL ENLARGING HIS VOCABULARY...

WHATEVER criticisms one may have of the current US President, it can hardly be denied that Donald Trump has a way with words.

I was intrigued to read, last Friday, that he had called James Comey, whom he had sacked in May as head of the FBI, “a weak and untruthful slime ball.”

My first thought concerned the term “slime ball”. Is it not more usual, I asked myself, to write this as one word, or at least with a hyphen between “slime” and “ball”?

To check this, I looked up the term, as one word, two words, or with a hyphen, in the Oxford English Dictionary and was dismayed to find that it has not yet been deemed worthy of an entry of its own. It does, however, appear as one word in three quotations, dating from 1993, 2001 and 2003, which strongly suggests that it was not in the vocabulary of Abraham Lincoln or George Washington.

Interestingly, the Merriam-Webster dictionary in the US does include “slimeball”, saying that its first known use was in 1986. It confirms that the traditional form is as a single word, which it defines as “a morally repulsive or odious person” and says, apropos Trump’s recent usage, that “it is of paramount importance that you do not confuse this word with scuzzball which we define as “an unpleasant, dirty, or dangerous person.”

Interestingly, Trump repeated the accusation on Sunday when he again referred to Comey as a “slimeball” but this time bowed to the authority of the OED and Merriam-Webster by tweeting it as a single word.

For me, the plot had already grown deeper on Friday when I read that “slimeball” had shot to the No.2 spot in a list of words most frequently looked up on the Merriam-Webster website, having increased its popularity by 60,000 per cent.

The only word beating it was “kakistocracy” which comes from the Greek word “kakistos” (worst) and means “government of a state by the worst citizens”. This was used in a Tweet by former CIA Director in which he told Trump that: “Your kakistocracy is collapsing after its lamentable journey.”

Both “slimeball” and “kakistocracy” have now been overtaken on the Merriam-Webster site by “lowlife” which can mean “a person of low social status” or “a person of low moral character”, though there is reason to believe the President had the latter definition in mind when he referred to Comey and his associates as a “den of thieves and lowlifes!”

With Donald Trump last week having been described by Robert De Niro as a “scumbag”, this war of rude words is clearly escalating and it can only be a matter of time before Jeremy Corbyn says that politicians should only be allowed to denigrate each other by words approved by the United Nations.

In the meantime, we may hope that Boris Johnson offers some other words that might be deployed, such as cumberworld (a person that uselessly encumbers the world), saddle-goose (a fool), or slubberdegullion (a slobbering or worthless fellow).