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I have a subscription to A Word a Day, which is a newsletter thing that, Monday through Friday, sends an email containing a word, its definition, and an example of that word used in a real life publication. Sometimes there is a theme for the week; sometimes the words are chosen at random. On weekends, the man who runs the list (Anu Garg) sends a compilation of various linguistics-related articles published online that week, as well as interesting feedback emails they received in relation to that week's words.
For the week of 5/4-5/8, the theme was forgotten positives: the chosen words were 'evitable,' 'wieldy,' 'exorable,' 'gainly,' and 'corrigible.'
One email in the weekly roundup caught my attention. M. Schueler writes:
During my years working for a beloved charity, one of the jobs concerned working with unhappy sponsors. I considered that responsibility to be the task of re-gruntling the disgruntled. It required a special type of personality, a person gifted with a great amount of ruth (it always bothered me that we use the word mercy as well as merciless, but we note ruth only in its absence).
This talk of 'ruth,' you see, is based on a faulty assumption. There is a pattern to these words that goes as follows: mercy, merciless, merciful; thought, thoughtless, thoughtful; faith, faithless, faithful; truth, truthless, truthful; help, helpless, helpful; etc.
According to that pattern, ruthless should be part of a sequence as follows: ruth, ruthless, ruthful. Unfortunately for Schueler's quip about 'ruth' being a useful quality, 'ruth' and 'ruthful' are not words in English.* But! Rue and rueful are.
I theorize, therefore, that the pattern originally went rue, rueless, rueful, but at some point before spellings were standardized, the pronunciation of 'rueless' shifted and acquired a 'th' before the 'less.' So 'ruthless' would originally have meant 'lacking the quality of rue or regret,' but its meaning has shifted slightly and become a closer synonym to 'merciless,' or to 'harsh.'
...
That has nothing to do with anything, really; it just amuses me.
*I grant you, 'Ruth' is a name, and one could have a lot of fun inventing etymologies of 'ruthless' based on the idea of a ruthless person being someone without the qualities of Ruth from the biblical Book of Ruth -- namely, love, compassion, and steadfast personal loyalty -- but that would be very silly. :-)
For the week of 5/4-5/8, the theme was forgotten positives: the chosen words were 'evitable,' 'wieldy,' 'exorable,' 'gainly,' and 'corrigible.'
One email in the weekly roundup caught my attention. M. Schueler writes:
During my years working for a beloved charity, one of the jobs concerned working with unhappy sponsors. I considered that responsibility to be the task of re-gruntling the disgruntled. It required a special type of personality, a person gifted with a great amount of ruth (it always bothered me that we use the word mercy as well as merciless, but we note ruth only in its absence).
This talk of 'ruth,' you see, is based on a faulty assumption. There is a pattern to these words that goes as follows: mercy, merciless, merciful; thought, thoughtless, thoughtful; faith, faithless, faithful; truth, truthless, truthful; help, helpless, helpful; etc.
According to that pattern, ruthless should be part of a sequence as follows: ruth, ruthless, ruthful. Unfortunately for Schueler's quip about 'ruth' being a useful quality, 'ruth' and 'ruthful' are not words in English.* But! Rue and rueful are.
I theorize, therefore, that the pattern originally went rue, rueless, rueful, but at some point before spellings were standardized, the pronunciation of 'rueless' shifted and acquired a 'th' before the 'less.' So 'ruthless' would originally have meant 'lacking the quality of rue or regret,' but its meaning has shifted slightly and become a closer synonym to 'merciless,' or to 'harsh.'
...
That has nothing to do with anything, really; it just amuses me.
*I grant you, 'Ruth' is a name, and one could have a lot of fun inventing etymologies of 'ruthless' based on the idea of a ruthless person being someone without the qualities of Ruth from the biblical Book of Ruth -- namely, love, compassion, and steadfast personal loyalty -- but that would be very silly. :-)
