“The oil that anointed kings became the grease of smooth-tongued flattery.”
The Latin verb ungere meant to smear or anoint with oil, and from it came unctio: the act of anointing. Roman physicians prescribed unguentum for wounds, priests poured oil over kings at coronation, and athletes slicked their bodies before wrestling in the gymnasium. Behind all these uses lay the Proto-Indo-European root ongw-, a word for grease or fat that also generated ungula, the Latin word for a hoof. When the term reached English through Old French onction around 1350, it arrived already consecrated by centuries of religious use.
In medieval Christian theology, unction was not a figure of speech but a sacrament. James 5:14 instructed the elders of the church to anoint the sick with oil and pray over them, and by the eighth century this had formalized into Extreme Unction, the last anointing given to the dying. Thomas Aquinas wrote about its mechanics in the Summa Theologica in the 1260s, placing it among the seven sacraments. The priest touched oil to the five senses in sequence, cleansing sins committed through seeing, hearing, smelling, speaking, and touching.
Shakespeare pushed the word into irony. In Hamlet (c. 1601), the Ghost warns his son that Claudius has poured unction into Gertrude's ear through witchcraft of wit, seducing her from loyalty. The image of oil as corruption was familiar from the psalms, but Shakespeare recycled it for the secular stage. By the 1700s, unctuous had settled into its current meaning: a manner so smoothly agreeable that it signals insincerity.
Today the word lives in two separate registers. In Catholic and Orthodox liturgy, the Anointing of the Sick (renamed from Extreme Unction by the Second Vatican Council in 1972) remains a sincere sacramental act. In everyday speech, unction is what a politician spreads when he wants you to trust him and you don't quite. The same oil that consecrated kings now warns us about those who shine a little too brightly.
Related Words
Today
Unction belongs to a category of words that have lived two lives without losing either one. The liturgical sense is still current in churches around the world, where consecrated oil marks the boundary between ordinary time and sacred crisis. The secular sense is equally alive, threading through political commentary and film reviews whenever someone's warmth seems a little too calculated.
The word is most useful when both meanings are felt at once, when someone's excessive smoothness carries just enough of the sacramental to make you wonder whether you are being blessed or sold. Oil is oil: it consecrates and it slicks.
Explore more words