"Smarmy" is a useful word, as anyone who has had to listen to an oleaginous colleague drone on in a business meeting can attest. Unlike most useful words, its origin can be traced to a particular person — who invented it as a joke.
The Oxford English Dictionary‘s principal definition for "smarmy" is "ingratiating, obsequious; smug, unctuous," and the first citation is from L. Brock, "Deductions of Col. Gore," published in 1924:
Don't you be taken in by that smarmy swine.
The word is widely used today, with more than 42,000 hits on Google News. A recent "New York Times" theater review says a Munich production of "A Midsummer Night’s Dream" turned "it into a Midsummer Nightmare, with a smarmy, sadistic Puck who gets his kicks by knocking Athenian lovers unconscious with his spells."
Looking to antedate the OED, as I do, I found a 1905 use of the word in the Google Books database: a poem called "The Widower" by Edward Sydney Tylee, published in "The Living Age." Tylee is going for an English West Country accent (sometimes referred to as Mummerset):
Moments after I proudly tweeted out my find, Jonathon Green, editor of "Green’s Dictionary of Slang," responded with a bit of skepticism: "Looking at other bits of [the] poem allowed by Google Books I’m certain it is a positive sense and not the current one. All simple rustic good fellowship, none of implications of modern 'smarmy.'"
On reflection, I took his point, although I couldn’t find such a good-fellowship meaning in any reference work or in any other text. The other recognized meaning of “smarmy“ derives from the verb "smarm" (sometimes spelled "smalm" or "smawm"), defined by the OED as "smear, bedaub" and first cited by the dictionary in an 1847 work, A Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words. The OED has a secondary definition of "smarmy" as...
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