Eggcorn Forum

Slug, noun for a lazy person, to slug, a verb for being slow/lazy, and sluggish, an adjective for slothful, have been with us since the fifteenth century. The terms may derive, says the OED, from a medieval Norwegian word. Only the adjectival form, sluggish, has retained currency in its original meaning. The noun, of course, continues to hang around with an altered meaning—a snail sans shell.

A slog, in the sense of a difficult traversal, and to slog, to beaver away at something tough or boring, came along in the nineteenth century. As one British dictionary of the period put it, to slog was to “walk with burdened feet.” The etymological source of the word “slog” is uncertain.

“Slog” has given birth to an adjective, “sloggy,” that has enjoyed a recent uptick in popularity “Sloggy” may have been influenced by “soggy,” an adjectival remnant of the all-but-vanished “sog.”

But what about “sloggish?” No dictionary lists it, but it shows up with some frequency on the web. Three examples:

Question on ISP forum: “Anybody else having sloggish response with servers and support today?”

Title of a blog entry: “Feeling Sloggish ”

Gamer forum:“ I downloaded it and gave it a go, and I’m fairly impressed so far, although some bits seem sloggish, the character seems a little slow using guns,”

It is possible that some of these people have recoined “sloggy,” but most users of “sloggish,” I suspect, have inoculated “sluggish” with the sense and spelling of “slog.”