Erik McDonald updates XIX век rarely enough that it always gives me a thrill to see a new post, and the latest, in his “Words new to me” series, features the obscure Russian word куделька; it begins:
Dictionaries say куделька can mean кудряшка, a curl of someone’s hair, or it can be a diminutive of кудель or куделя, either meaning “sliver” with a long “i,” or it can be used in the regional idiom дать кудельку or дать куделю, meaning to pull someone by the hair or severely punish them.
He goes on to talk about a different meaning (“soldiers in the time of Nicholas I would use куделька to refer to the ‘ceremonial march past the emperor’ that came at the end of an elaborate military parade”) with a funny etymology, but I got stuck at “sliver with a long i”: what the hell was that? If you follow the link, Merriam-Webster tells you the meaning is “an untwisted strand or rope of textile fiber produced by a carding or combing machine and ready for drawing, roving, or spinning” and it’s definition 2, 1 being “a long slender piece cut or torn off”; sure enough, it says “sense 2 is usually ˈslī-.” But AHD gives the normal short-i pronunciation (slĭv′ər) for all senses, and the antiquated OED entry (from 1912) has “Pronunciation: Brit. /ˈslɪvə/, /ˈslʌɪvə/, U.S. /ˈslɪvər/, /ˈslaɪvər/,” with no sense distinction. (The noun is from an archaic verb slive “To cleave, split, divide.”) Is anybody familiar with this specialized sense and how it’s said by those who use the word? As I commented at Erik’s site, “I always thought of кудель as ‘tow,’ though all such words are purely theoretical to me.”
Growing up in the Blackstone Valley area of Rhode Island, all us kids went to Slater’s Mill to see early textile technology, and part of the field trip always involved handling slivers, a preliminary step in making thread to be woven into cloth.
The docents emphasized that these slivers were not pronounced like a “sliver of wood”, but like “sly-vers”.
[ʌɪ]? So Canadian Raising really is Un-Canadian Lowering?
The docents emphasized that these slivers were not pronounced like a “sliver of wood”, but like “sly-vers”.
Thanks very much!
docent
WT… ?? Didn’t know this English word. The OED says
#
1. (in certain US and European universities and colleges) a member of the teaching staff immediately below professorial rank.
2. a person who acts as a guide, typically on a voluntary basis, in a museum, art gallery, or zoo.
#
A Dozent is someone employed by a German university or school, resembling 1. I never understood the job hierarchy titles at universities and colleges.
You’ve been out of the country too long. AHD:
Did this word come in over the last 30-40 years or so ? Never heard it as a kid going to museums and planetariums, I think.
Yeah, I think so. I don’t remember it as a kid either.
[ʌɪ]? So Canadian Raising really is Un-Canadian Lowering?
OED /ʌɪ/ for PRICE vowel is thanks to Clive Upton; John Wells disapproves:
Did this word come in over the last 30-40 years or so?
Well, possibly, though it would have been at the very extreme end of that range. A certain great aunt of mine pioneered a docent program at a popular California state park (and now has memorial fund there named for her) but said great aunt died at a ripe old age of 90-something after having been a docent in the park for decades…and that was decades ago.
The museum-and-similar-institutions sense of “docent” strikes me as so common that if it hasn’t been around my entire life I have whatever the reverse of a Recency Illusion is called, but I’ve never noticed it used in a U.S. academic setting. Don’t know whether these “some universities” are non-U.S. or have just escaped my attention.
A Dozent is someone employed by a German university or school, resembling 1. I never understood the job hierarchy titles at universities and colleges.
As far as I can tell, доцент means the exact same thing in a Russian context – probably borrowed from German.
said great aunt died at a ripe old age of 90-something after having been a docent in the park for decades
Perhaps she invented the word, but people thought for a long time that she was saying “decent”. We all want decent docents, right ?
The long i pronunciation is vaguely familiar to me, but I doubt I could have remembered what it referred to. The OED definition is similar to the Merriam-Webster one quoted in the post, but it says “ready for drawing, roving, or slubbing.” So I looked up “slub,” and the OED defines the verb as meaning “to cover or plaster with mud,” deriving from the noun form, meaning “thick sludgy mud; mire, ooze.” Both senses of slub are said to be dialectical, but I while I had encountered the noun before, the verb was completely new to me.
As to docent: I did not know what the word meant when I first encountered it in Where in Europe is Carmen Sandiego? (released 1988). I think it was a few more years before it was a really commonplace term for museum workers (although—see below—it has been used sporadically for over a century). The OED entry for this sense is quite interesting, because it shows how the term was coined and how it related to the earlier university meaning. The first citation is:
1906 Bull. Mus. Fine Arts (Boston) June 19/1 Through these docents, as it has been proposed to call them, the heads of departments could instruct many more persons than it would be possible for them to accompany through the galleries.
It says the term is “originally and chiefly U.S.,” which is born out by a 1984 quote from the New Zealand Herald:
There is nothing indecent about docent… One critic of the name—chosen for the guides at the Auckland City Art Gallery and at the Museum of Transport and Technology—says it is ugly, un-English, unfamiliar and harsh-sounding.
I’ve just been reading about Germanic Class 1 strong verbs in English: one of them is slive (rhymes with drive), simple past slove or slived, past participle sliven or slived, ‘to cut, split, separate’. Never heard of it except in dictionaries; Wiktionary says it’s obsolete or dialectal. It’s the source of sliver in all senses, so maybe the textile sense preserves an old pronunciation?
The Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford and their successors, bless ’em, tell us that the first use of docent in this sense they have found is from 1906, and it must have been pretty new then:
I suppose the idea was that whereas the “heads of departments” were professors (in the literal sense) of their subject matters, the docents were those who taught the public. Google Ngrams shows much earlier uses right back to 1800 (their earliest), but a spot-check shows mostly books that are actually in Latin, or have Latin or French quotations, or are mis-OCRs of decent. Back in 1845, the OED does show docent authority ‘teaching authority (of a church)’.
On the other hand, someone in New Zealand described the word as late as 1984 thus: “ugly, un-English, unfamiliar and harsh-sounding”.
The entry for sliver in the first edition of the AHD (1969) had “also [ slī′ vər] for sense 2” (the spinning sense). This note on pronunciation was eliminated in the third edition (1992). (There is no second edition of the deluxe AHD. The first edition of the AHD College edition fills the role of the second deluxe edition.) The elimination of this pronunciation variant is just one of many, many decisions made by the management and staff of the third edition that I disagree with. I have heard that it was discovered during the preparation of the third edition that it was running far too long, by a third or a half or something very serious like that, and drastic cuts had to be made to bring it down a size that the bindery could handle as a single volume. Deadlines did not allow the staff to make the most careful or deliberative consideration of what was to be cut. After that, the pronunciation of sliver was perhaps not reviewed at all in the preparation of the fourth edition (2000) and the fifth edition (2011), as the dictionary market contracted and editorial staff was again put under enormous pressure.
There have been huge cuts in lexicographical staffing over the past two decades, first at the Random House Dictionary, by followed by deep cuts at the New Oxford American Dictionary, Webster’s New World, the AHD, and now most recently at Merriam Webster. And we were just discussing the recent layoffs of OED staff at the Oxford University Press in the UK. I hope the Wiktionary can step in and supply the deficiency in certain areas. It’s notable that the Wiktionary does not record the pronunciation variant either:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sliver
Since it appears that spinners continue to use the pronuciation /ˈslaɪ.vɚ/, maybe someone can even add it to the Wiktionary today! I would add it myself but I am not familiar enough with Wiktionary coding and style to be confident in adding it properly.
By the way, it’s nice that the Wiktionary records the North American regional meaning “small splinter under the skin”.
A depressing and enlightening comment; thanks for that.
J. C. Wells’s Longman Pronunciation Dictionary records the diphthongal pronuciation as being used “in some rare technical senses”. The Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary has only the short vowel.
Here are some examples of /ˈslaɪ.vɚ/ in the wild:
https://youtu.be/AUM4DAN34SE?t=118
https://youtu.be/_9Uhppc1-2c
https://youtu.be/bpi9hN78bJ0
All from North America. I also briefly looked for videos from Ireland and the UK in which the pronunciation with the diphthong could be heard, but didn’t happen across any. Maybe someone else can find examples.
Thanks — now I know what a sliver looks like!
slive – slove – sliven
Norw. sleiv “ladle” is presumably related, as another “spoon” image. A regular cognate would be **sloav or **slove. The word (or a homonym of it) also has meanings similar to English ‘snide’. sleivspark (in football) “miskick”; (metaphorically) “snide remark”. sleivkjeft “loadmouth, careless speaker”
Snide is a variant of snithe ‘cut (v)’ > ‘sharp, cutting; piercingly cold (adj)’, lost in most English but preserved oop North, with obvious cognates schneiden and Sw snida.
Snithe is dialectical, but the cognate snee, meaning a large knife or a stab delivered with one, is still current, especially in British varieties. The only version that I have natively, however, is snickersnee, in which the two constituents may or may not trace back to the same root.
ODS does claim cognate origin for Da slev/No sleiv n and E slive v.
Thank you for this my name is derived from this and I was looking for what it means for the longest time