"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
JPL said,
September 29, 2025 @ 2:00 am
@Tim Leonard:
I find your comment puzzling (in a good way), because after listening to the video, my first response was that if I had been in Geoff Bennett's shoes I would have immediately asked Mr Cobb, "What do you mean by ' slav+ish+ly devoted'?" You said the fact that 'slave' is the derivational source for 'slavish' is obvious to you, but why didn't you say it was known to you before you read this post? When you say you "would have pronounced it slav+ish+ly", what is "it" referring to there, and do you mean that you've always pronounced the word 'slavish' with the pronunciation used by Mr Cobb? If so, what has been your understanding of the sense of the phrase "slavishly devoted" prior to this? I'm not by any means judging your vocabulary knowledge, I'm just hoping you can answer the question I would have liked to ask Mr Cobb. To me the word 'slavish' indicates a rigid adherence to self-imposed routine or rule, etc., not to a rule necessarily imposed by force from outside. I wouldn't say "devoted" is a feeling a slave would have had for their master, although a deluded master might have thought they had. So if Trump is the slave-owner, he's looking for people who are devoted to him the way he thinks slaves were devoted their masters? If Mr Cobb meant that, I would say that's probably accurate, since Trump is a proper solipsist. But it looks like there has been a bit of "semantic drift" between 'slave' and 'slavish', for some reason.
Tom said,
September 29, 2025 @ 6:31 am
Perhaps the speaker just feels emancipated from the received pronunciation.
David Morris said,
September 29, 2025 @ 7:38 am
It might be more apposite to talk about Vladimir Putin appointing people who are slav-ishly devoted to him.
Jerry Packard said,
September 29, 2025 @ 7:52 am
I’ve never pronounced it as anything other than slav+ish+ly
JimG said,
September 29, 2025 @ 7:55 am
On a tangent from the discussion of pronunciation, has nobody wondered at the triple adverbial "clearly slavishly devoted" with suffixes -ish and -ly, modifying devoted? The pronunciation issue would go away if the the word became "slave-like", particularly because "clearly" perfects the -ish anyway..
Philip Taylor said,
September 29, 2025 @ 8:40 am
Whereas I have never heard it pronounced as anything other than "slave-ish-ly", Jerry. US/UK difference ?
Seonachan said,
September 29, 2025 @ 9:01 am
I'm from the US and this is the first I've ever heard anyone pronounce it "slav". Not that it's a word you hear every day.
Jerry Packard said,
September 29, 2025 @ 1:34 pm
I’m not sure about the US/UK difference, Phillip. I heard the Cobb interview on TV, and it would have sounded a bit odd to me if I had heard slave+ish. I see it is glossed in all dictionaries I’ve referenced as slave+ish, but to my mind the fact that the meaning is derivative, that is, not literally slave-like, anoints the derived slav+ish pronunciation. One thing I don’t think it is is clever reference to Putin, in which case I’d expect [slav] vs [slæv] or [sleiv]. If I had heard Cobb say [slav] I would have noticed it and taken it to be a clever pun.
ktschwarz said,
September 29, 2025 @ 4:54 pm
I've never heard it as "slav"-ishly before today, but Youglish provided 80 clips of slavish in US English* and 75 of slavishly, and for each of those I heard about five** pronounced "slav"+"ish". So the spelling pronunciation is out there, including in contexts unrelated to Slavs. I'm betting Cobb was not making a deliberate joke.
(On the UK side, out of 10 slavish and 20 slavishly, one was clearly "slav"+"ishly".)
* As usual with Youglish, a few are misclassified, not actually L1 American speakers.
** As usual, some are just repetitions of the same clip or same speaker, so don't take the numbers too seriously.
Barbara Phillips Long said,
September 29, 2025 @ 5:34 pm
When I use them, slavishly, slavishness, and slavering all begin with the same sounds as "slave." They don't sound like Slav or lavish.
J.W. Brewer said,
September 29, 2025 @ 6:52 pm
Separately, back in Cold War times, it might have made sense to treat "Slav" as a functional synonym for Russian/Soviet/Communist, since all Slavic nations were under direct or indirect Soviet rule except I guess the Titoist outlier which had problems of its own. But where many of the most high-profile concerns about the present Russian government concern its invasion of another Slavic country, and where our NATO ally Poland is extremely prominent for its anti-Muscovite stance, Slav-ish = Putinesque doesn't flow nearly so well.
SlideSF said,
September 30, 2025 @ 2:40 pm
@JPL, and matters of pronunciation aside (even though that was the point of the post, I think), my understanding of "slavishly devoted" (which I am not unfamiliar with as a term in common usage) is not that that the subject is devoted to the object in the same way as a slave is devoted to their master. Rather, that the subject's relationship to devotion (to the object) is similar to the relationship of a slave to their master.
As to the original point: in all my years, I have never heard it pronounced the way it is (perhaps a little bit pointedly or self-consciously?) by Mr Cobb. Whether that is a reflection of my own Slavic heritage is anybody's guess.
Michael Watts said,
October 1, 2025 @ 7:36 pm
I am bemused to see that Merriam-Webster and wiktionary both agree that "slavish" has just a single pronunciation, /'sleɪvɪʃ/. It's always been /'slævɪʃ/ to me.
(from "A simple way to model prosody in reading"; the comment threads have inadvertently crossed)
1. My understanding of the current semantic relationship is that the words "slave" and "slavish" have no semantic relationship.
2. A historical morphological relationship is very plausible on spelling grounds, but I don't see why this would imply that they should be pronounced with the same vowel. Compare the second "c" in "electricity", where the relationship to "electric" is clear to everyone, and more than just historical. Or the "a" in "slave", which isn't shared with the word from which it is derived, "Slav".
3. Presumably the sense that "slav-" contributes to the meaning of "slavish" is analogous to the sense that "ombu-" contributes to "ombudsman". Words do not need to be compositionally transparent. The concept is often defined by reference to a lack of compositional transparency.
GH said,
October 2, 2025 @ 12:17 am
@JPL (who responded to a comment posted to the article "A simple way to model prosody in reading" by mistake):
Given the vagaries of English pronunciation, the implicit argument doesn't strike me as having much force. Why are the vowels in "grave" and "gravity" (or "depraved" and "depravity," "nation"/"nationality") different? Or compare "brass"/"brazen," "Spain"/"Spanish," "divisive"/"divisible," "cone"/"conic."
It's common in English for syllables to switch pronunciation between long and short vowels in related words, according to complicated and only partially predictable patterns.
@Michael Watts:
This I find astonishing. So to you, "slavish" does not suggest a semantic relationship to "slave" similar to "child"/"childish," "fool"/"foolish," "slug"/"sluggish," "nightmare"/"nightmarish," "Dane"/"Danish," etc.?
What do you mean by this? Are you saying you would decompose "ombudsman" into "ombu-" and "-dsman"?
If you don't find that "slavish" has a transparent composition as "slav-" and "-ish," does that extend to all adjectives that end in "-ish," (including things like "fortyish" and "Kennedyish")? Or what sets this one apart?
GH said,
October 2, 2025 @ 1:43 am
Perhaps a better follow-up question is to ask how the semantics of "slavish" are represented in your mind. How would you gloss the meaning of the word? Because in my mind it is something like "slave-like, in the manner of a slave," so the relationship is obvious.
@SlideSF
I believe I agree, though I would express it slightly differently. In older times (as seen in novels of the era), a man might gallantly say to a woman things like "I am your slave." I take this not as a reference to institutionalized slavery, but to the more general notion of having lost his freedom and being at her command. In other words, "slavishly devoted" means that your devotion has made you a slave.
Michael Watts said,
October 2, 2025 @ 2:09 am
What sets it apart is precisely the fact that there is no semantic connection between the two words. The meaning of fortyish is very close to the meaning of forty, but this is not true of slavish and slave. Similarly, there is no relationship between Dane and danish, or between rub and rubbish – and those are cases where the vowel doesn't change. Why should there be one between slave and slavish? That's not the way words work.
To me, slavish refers to concepts in the area of "extreme effort", "extreme attention to detail", and "rigid adherence". It implies that nothing, no matter how small or insignificant, would be overlooked, and no deviation, no matter how small or insignificant, would occur.
GH said,
October 2, 2025 @ 5:31 am
For one thing, those are nouns, not (primarily) adjectives—though of course English is flexible in that regard. The rule that adjectives of the form "X-ish" mean "like X" appears to be practically universal. (The only exceptions I have found are "lavish," where the ending is a corruption by analogy to other "-ish" adjectives, "garish," which probably does follow the rule, but where the root has been lost, and "delish" as a shortening of "delicious," which has a different stress pattern.)
Also, "danish" is short for "Danish pastry," so there is a semantic link. (Such pastries are popular in Denmark, but were apparently invented in Vienna and are known as Viennese pastries in most languages. Since the first attestation is from 1943, the name may have been a deliberate attempt to obscure the Austro-German origin, similar to how the German Mastiff breed was rechristened Great Dane/Grand Danois in the run-up to WWI, even though it has nothing to do with Denmark.)
We could quibble over those meanings, but can you seriously claim that you don't see any semantic connection between slavery and work that takes extreme effort and rigid adherence, with no tolerance of error? What about the verb "to slave" (as in "slaving away" at some task)?
Michael Watts said,
October 2, 2025 @ 5:46 am
Yes? I don't know why you would be confused by this.
ajay said,
October 2, 2025 @ 5:48 am
What sets it apart is precisely the fact that there is no semantic connection between the two words. The meaning of fortyish is very close to the meaning of forty, but this is not true of slavish and slave. Similarly, there is no relationship between Dane and danish
Michael, please stop trolling.
Philip Taylor said,
October 2, 2025 @ 8:21 am
Michael was probably thinking of "Bane" and "banish", Ajay (he said, charitably).
Rodger C said,
October 2, 2025 @ 9:48 am
there is no relationship between Dane and danish
?????????????????????????
GH said,
October 2, 2025 @ 11:57 am
Your position appears so patently absurd – and apparently not only to me – that I think it falls on you to clarify.
Michael Watts said,
October 2, 2025 @ 5:34 pm
There is no semantic link between slavery and working extremely hard or extremely punctiliously. Therefore, I do not perceive any such semantic link. What more do you want me to say?
Well, there are three comments expressing confusion over the claim that ethnicities and pastries are not semantically similar ideas. You, GH, seemed to agree with me on that one, so it isn't clear where you think the other confused commenters are agreeing with you.
GH said,
October 3, 2025 @ 2:14 am
Oh, let's just start with how you account for dictionary definitions like:
slave
noun One who works extremely hard.
intransitive verb To work very hard or doggedly; toil.
(American Heritage Dictionary, 5th ed.)
That you are able to glean that impression from "there is a semantic link" may explain much that is baffling in this exchange.
Michael Watts said,
October 3, 2025 @ 3:43 am
Well, I also read the first part of that very sentence:
There is at least one error here no matter how you hope to interpret the sentence:
1. "Danish" is not short for "Danish pastry"; it isn't possible to substitute "Danish pastry" in to a sentence that uses the word "danish". "Danish" is just the name of a variety of pastry.
2. "Danish" is etymologically related to the ethnic term "Danish", and this fact might rescue the claim that "'danish' is short for 'Danish pastry'". But it would be a gross error to call this a semantic link. It isn't one. You would be simultaneously arguing that there is a semantic link between the concepts of "Slav" and "slave". There used to be one. But there isn't one now.
So, I concluded that (a) you have no idea what does or doesn't constitute a semantic link, but (2) you agree that one is not present between the concepts of "Dane" and "danish".
GH said,
October 3, 2025 @ 6:39 am
I gave you the benefit of the doubt longer than I probably should have. Not going to feed the troll further.
Rodger C said,
October 3, 2025 @ 9:50 am
"Danish" is not short for "Danish pastry"; it isn't possible to substitute "Danish pastry" in to a sentence that uses the word "danish". "Danish" is just the name of a variety of pastry.
I can't forbear commenting on his. I (b. 1948) grew up hearing nothing but "Danish pastry," later shortened to "danish." (And my spellcheck doesn't recognize the lower-case spelling.) And now, enough of you.
Philip Taylor said,
October 4, 2025 @ 4:06 am
« I (b. 1948) grew up hearing nothing but "Danish pastry" » — I'm amazed that you weren't taken into care, if those were the only words that your parents ever used …
ardj said,
October 12, 2025 @ 2:14 pm
@Phillip Taylor: Bravo
Reluctantly joining a discussion that has clearly degenerated, I am astonished that (almost) none of you seem to have heard of the country, Denmark, of its citizens – each of whom is a Dane – and who is correctly described as Danish – as are many other delightful things like the Storebæltsforbindelsen (or Storebæltsbroen to the uninitiated) and the landscape at Skagen and the girls (and I suppose, the men, mostly) and the very decent beers and ….