slippery as an eel

Idioms  

1. Elusive, devious, as in When it comes to talking about his investments, Jim's slippery as an eel. This simile, first recorded about 1412, alludes to the eel's skin, which has tiny scales and is quite slippery when wet.

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Example Sentences

Reviewing it, Tobias Grey calls the book a “force of nature” with a narrative as “slippery as an eel and tangled like the murky, wreckage-strewn waterways of its Oxfordshire setting.”

From New York Times

Its narrative is slippery as an eel and tangled like the murky, wreckage-strewn waterways of its Oxfordshire setting.

From New York Times

As I walked uphill, repeating Ashbery’s lines to myself, I found them as slippery as an eel, almost Heraclitean because it’s so hard to say the same line of Ashbery exactly the same way twice.

From Salon

Tommy was as quick—and as slippery—as an eel.

From Project Gutenberg

In Hudson’s words, Messi has “chameleon eyes” and is as “slippery as an eel covered in Vaseline” and plays with the predatory appetite of a “zombie hunter looking for a Twinkie.”

From New York Times