"Slav-ishly devoted"
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In an interview yesterday, Ty Cobb (the lawyer, not the baseball player) answered a question from Geoff Bennett:
GEOFF BENNETT: How do you assess the way President Trump in his second term has asserted control over the Justice Department and many of the prosecutors who work for it, as compared to the first term?
TY COBB: Well, he appointed people who were clearly slavishly devoted to him and willing to break any ethical barriers or legal barriers to do his bidding.
In transcript form, the answer is unexceptional. But Mr. Cobb pronounces "slavishly" as if its morphology were slav+ish+ly rather than slave+ish+ly.
It's conceivable that this is a sly allusion to the "Russia Russia Russia" controversy, rather than a plain old spelling pronunciation. What do you think?
Tim Leonard said,
September 28, 2025 @ 6:12 pm
I also would have pronounced it slav+ish+ly due to spelling pronunciation, because I've only read it and never heard it pronounced. That's even though its derivation from slave is obvious to me.
Jonathan Smith said,
September 28, 2025 @ 6:25 pm
not to be confused with "Slavically devoted", "loyalty or religious devotion to Slavic deities within the context of Slavic Native Faith (Rodnovery)" (hat tip Google AI Overview).
Brett said,
September 28, 2025 @ 6:42 pm
I wouldn't use it, but I have definitely heard this spelling pronunciation before.
wgj said,
September 28, 2025 @ 7:17 pm
Given that the word slave is derived from Slav, the pronunciation does seem plausible.
JAS said,
September 28, 2025 @ 7:42 pm
I can't recall if I've ever head slavish or slavishly pronounced my entire life, but this feels more like a mandela effect moment. Next, you are going to tell me "lavish" is pronounced lave-ish.
Anyway, it's interesting, but shouldn't we be pronouncing it with the a instead the æ or the eɪ
NSBK said,
September 28, 2025 @ 8:06 pm
I wonder also if phonetically-adjacent "lavishly" has any influence here.
cameron said,
September 28, 2025 @ 11:28 pm
is he a native English speaker?
if he is, then he really needs to get out among educated people more