The Lunxicon

Unctuous. What a great word. I just love the way it sounds—the juxtaposition of the short and sharp with the long and drawn out: How the first half sounds like the cry of a mildly retarded child who has just scraped his/her knee. This is quickly cut off by the hard “t” sound, which transitions into the vowel-heavy second syllable, elongated by the “s” at the end. (Yeah, so I’m no linguistics expert, but I’m also rather lazy, so I wasn’t gonna look up the proper terms to describe the above.)

Another reason to love it is how onomatopoetic it is. Someone who is full of unction strikes you immediately. He or she will usually enter your life suddenly and without invitation, lingering for a greater period than is acceptable.

“Unctuous,” if you don’t know, means excessively and insincerely ingratiating. In other words, that kissass who just got hired and is trying way too hard to be everyone’s friend at work—far too hard to actually be sincere—is an unctuous little man. Everyone knows or has met a person like this. The person who is suddenly interested in whatever you are interested in, whether or not Unctuous Jones knows anything about those interests. And I don’t mean this like when you first start dating someone and you pretend to be really into museums just because she has a master’s in art history and is really hot. No, I mean like the girl who hears you are from Asia and starts talking about how she loves Asian culture. Especially the food, but then is suddenly disgusted by it when her boss walks by and says he finds Asian food too oily.

Take my old boss, for example. If it was your birthday, you’d have to have a party. And at the party she would ask you all sorts of questions as she pretended to be interested in your life: “So, Evelyn, what are you going to do to celebrate? Is your husband going to take you out? When will I get to meet him? He is such a lucky young man.” Two days later, Evelyn’s husband was in a near-fatal car crash, so she went to the ER to be with him. When my boss arrived that day, I told her what happened and received an irritated sigh and an eye-roll in response. Yeah.

There are, of course, other meanings to the word. Its more technical definition is something oily or fatty. This then evolved to mean somebody overly suave and smug. Bill O’Reilly, anyone? However, I prefer to use it to describe those mealymouthed types who waste my time with their assumption that I can’t see right through them.

Wow, this kind of read like a 14-year-old’s journal. Oh well, I’m just an old hardcore kid who hates FAKES, I guess. Whatever, mosh on.