Words new to me: куделька

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. But I came across a different meaning in what’s reported to be a nineteenth-century context. According to Erast Kuznetsov, 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. He explains why right away, so I didn’t get the pleasure of struggling with this one the way I did with шаккендс: “this march was called a coup d’œil for some reason, and the soldiers, following Russians’ age-old tradition of adapting everything to their own way of doing things, called it a kudel’ka” (51).

Kuznetsov also mentions “Бом двысь!”: sentry jargon for an order to raise the gate once someone’s papers have been checked, short for шлагбаум подвысь (49).

See E. Kuznetsov, Pavel Fedotov (Leningrad: Iskusstvo, 1990). For a biography of an artist, this book spends a lot of time on details of day-to-day life at military schools and in military units—not stories of Fedotov’s particular army career, necessarily, but what it must have been like for a person like him.