“Politics has become so bitter and partisan,” Senator Barack Obama said, “so gummed up by money and influence. . . .” Though the rest of his sentence petered out into a bureaucratic “big problems that demand solutions,” what struck me was the forceful word picture evoked by the verb phrase gummed up. Here was a presidential candidate unafraid to use a slang verb with verve. It’s an Americanism in the sense of “spoiled,” first cited by the O.E.D. in the college slang at Yale in 1901. Rudyard Kipling helped it along to trans-Atlantic status with a pregnant observation in a...