Its use as a figurative verb, however, is more recent; people have only been oozing certain qualities since the period of late Middle English. Today, people are said to ooze all sorts of thing - confidence, charm, sex appeal ... - but I have never heard before this week someone say of another person that they oozed intelligence and I have to admit the idea has troubled me ever since.
For I suppose, despite my libidinal materialism and background in Lawrence (who famously writes on this question in terms of blood), I've always thought of intelligence as a form of Geist or animating spirit that irradiates from an individual rather than oozes, lighting up their features and quickening their movements.
Now, I know that this is to reinscribe spirit back into an oppositional determination (and thus to fall back into metaphysics) - but there you go! Metaphysics invariably comes back to beset us whenever we attempt to address this question of mind or intelligence; Geist is always haunted by Geist, as Derrida puts it.
I suppose, ultimately, the reason that I find the use of the word ooze objectionable in relation to intelligence is because I don't see the latter as some form of corruption and don't mistrust or dislike intelligent people - as I suspect the speaker does.
On the contrary, I'm very much attracted to individuals who are fast-thinking and quick-witted; men and women who are like little silvery streams racing over the rocks, rather than those clots who seem to pride themselves on their moral and intellectual stagnancy and ooze disdain for everything free-flowing and alive.
Note: the image used for this post is taken from the cover of Ben Woodard's Slime Dynamics (Zero Books, 2012), a work that interestingly argues that slime is an essential element of a realist bio-philosophy free from anthropocentric conceit. For me, the image also illustrates how the stupid secretly conceive of intelligence; i.e. as something monstrous, threatening, and excrescent; something that might be said to ooze ...
