A Quick and Simple Dictionary

slumgullion

1. Noun.  A stew of meat and vegetables.
2. Noun.  A beverage made watery, such as weak coffee or tea.
3. Noun.  A reddish muddy deposit in mining sluices.
4. Noun.  A sperm whaleman's term, roughly equivalent to the right whaleman's "gurry" which, according to Herman Melville, "designates the dark, glutinous substance which is scraped off the back of the Greenland or Right Whale, and much of which covers the decks of those inferior souls who hunt that ignoble Leviathan."(Melville 323) Derivation for this term likely originates with the word "slobgollion" which is, according to Melville's Moby Dick, "an appellation original with the whaleman, and even so is the nature of the substance. It is an ineffably oozy, stringy affair, most frequently found in the tubs of sperm, after a prolonged squeezing, and subsequent decanting. I hold it to be the wondrously thin, ruptured Membranes of the case, coalescing." (Melville 323).