sleaze: [20] It is common practice to name fabrics after their place of manufacture, and from the 17th century that applied to cloth made in Silesia (a region in east-central Europe, now mainly within Poland), and in particular to a type of fine linen or cotton. It did not take long for Silesia to be worn down to Slesia or Sleasia and finally to Sleasie. Also in the 17th century we find sleasie being applied as an adjective to fabrics that are thin or flimsy, and although a connection between the two usages has never been proved, the closeness of meaning seems unlikely to be coincidental.
Soon sleasie (or sleazy) was being used metaphorically for ‘slight, flimsy, insubstantial’. It took a sudden sideways semantic leap in the 1930s and 40s when it began to be used as a term of moral disapproval, denoting squalor, depravity or slatternliness, and it was in this sense that the back-formed noun sleaze first emerged in the 1960s. Then in the 1980s the word shifted its target from sex to financially motivated misdemeanours, notably the taking of bribes (the new usage is first recorded in ‘The sleaze factor’, a chapter heading in the book Gambling with History (1983) by the US journalist Laurence Barrett).
sleaze (n.)
"condition of squalor," by 1967, back-formation from sleazy. Meaning "person of low moral standards," and the adjectival use, are attested from 1976.
雙語例句
1. The candidate was seriously damaged by the sleaze factor.
那位候選人的形象因丑聞而受到嚴重損害。
來自《權威詞典》
2. She claimed that an atmosphere of sleaze and corruption now surrounded the Government.
她宣稱一股骯臟腐敗之風充斥著整個政府。
來自柯林斯例句
3. The President denounced the press for engaging in "sleaze" and called the story a lie.
總統譴責媒體參與了骯臟交易，稱該報道是謊言。
來自柯林斯例句
4. There was a lot of sleaze going on at that night club.
那夜總會的表演有很多是低三下四的.
來自辭典例句
5. There is no direct connection between the financial turmoil and political sleaze.