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A lot of Americans have a dislike or even fear of snakes, and when asked why, a common reason is that they are "slimy." Primary educators (grade-school -- grades 1 - 6 -- teachers), in fact, often bring in harmless snakes (such as the common American snake called a "garter snake," which is typically about 10cm long and has no venom. Persuading the children to handle a garter snake is sometimes difficult, but, once they do, they realize that snakes are not "slimy." A snake just out of water may be wet, but even wet is different from "slimy."
The noun "slime" is used for semi-liquid substances that are viscous (thick) and sticky to the extent of being unpleasant to have on one's skin (they also have an unpleasant lubricating effect on the skin and often a repulsive smell. The trail left by snails and slugs is "slime," and thing that cover themselves with slime are "slimy."
Many adjectives are formed by attaching a "y" to a noun (sometimes also dropping a silent "e" from the noun, as in "slime" ---> "slimy"). This is also sometimes done to verbs, as in "stick" ---> "sticky." As often as not, a final consonant gets doubled ("fog" ---> "foggy," "sun" ---> "sunny," "run" ---> "runny,"
It happens too often that a child who has handled a snake, and hence concedes that they are not "slimy," nevertheless still doesn't like them, "because they are slimy -- not slimy slimy, but just slimy. In other words, the child retains the dislike, but now has to use an extended meaning of "slimy," which is an adjective often applied to people one does not trust because one perceives them as tricky or disingenuous (less than completely honest). That snakes are perceived this way probably originates in the myth of the serpent in the Garden of Eden.
Many, many adjectives are of this "add a 'y'" construction, including some where the originating root no longer exists (happy, pretty, silly). The word "silly" illustrates a danger in this -- don't confuse the rule of converting an adjective into an adverb by adding "ly" with this rule, where one is converting a noun or a verb into an adjective by adding "y." The word "silly" is an adjective, even though it looks like an adverb because it ends in "ly." Here the "l" comes from the root, not from the suffix. The adverb for "silly" would be "sillily," but this abomination should probably be avoided and a sentence needing it be recast.
Both rules derive from forms of the word "like," and, in fact, another way (not generally found in formal writing) of making adjectives out of other words is to attach "-like" (often with a hyphen but sometimes not). Thus we have the noun "horse" made into an adjective with "horsey" (a description of a person who loves horses) and "horse-like" (to describe the shape of something that resembles the shape of a horse). This example also illustrates another danger here -- even though usually the meaning of the adjective formed this way is obvious, don't be too confident.
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