Someone can be ruthless, but can that person be ruthful? Ruthful is indeed a word that derives from an old definition of ruth meaning “the quality of being compassionate.” But unpaired negatives, like ruthless, unkempt, uncouth, or disgruntled, are common words that lack positive correlatives in common speech. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Ruthful”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Singh calling from San Diego.
Hi Singh, welcome to the show.
Thank you very much.
How can we help?
Oh, I was chit-chatting with some friends and we came across a word that I thought was right up your alley.
And the word is ruthless.
And I started thinking about it and it actually has three parts to this question concerning the word ruthless.
We have words like thoughtful, thoughtless, careful, careless, but I don’t know if there’s a Ruth-ful compared to Ruth-less.
Villains and bad guys are ruthless, but are heroes and great people, are they Ruth-ful?
Good question.
Yeah, and also, does it have any roots in the book of Ruth, in the Bible?
Right. We can help you with that. You might guess that it’s related to Ruth and the Hebrew name Ruth, but it’s not.
However, it is related to the word rue, like if you rue the day that something happened.
It has to do with regret and repentance. And there’s an old word, Ruth, that means the quality of being compassionate.
So you can actually say someone is full of Ruth.
Yes, you can say they’re Ruthful.
I’ve never heard that in my life. At least no one’s ever accused me of being full of Ruth.
Ruthless, maybe, but not Ruthful.
Right, right. It feels right. It’s Ruthiness, right?
But these aren’t common. They exist.
No, no, they’re not common at all.
They’re fairly literate, right? They’re not the kind of thing you would say in day-to-day conversation, if at all.
Yeah, yeah, pretty archaic. I mean, you make a good point that you have thoughtful and thoughtless, but you don’t really have Ruthful and Ruthless.
The third part of the question that is centered around this word ruthless, are there other words that fit this pattern that has the less in it but without the full in it?
So that might be a brain teaser right now.
Well, there are what we call zero positives where it seems as if the positive form has gone missing.
Ruthless is one of those that people come up with.
What are the other ones?
Well, I don’t know.
Couth. Uncouth and couth.
We don’t usually say that someone has couth.
We say that they are uncouth.
So there are a few of these.
If you Google the word uncouth and ruthless, you probably will come right away to a long list of these things.
Because they’re kind of a classic trope of the puzzler crowd.
And Singh, I would say that Grant and I are both very gruntled that you called.
Indeed.
There is an old term gruntled, but usually you hear disgruntled.
Yeah, the negative form is far more common.
But this is the nature of language.
The negative and positives of an antonym pair don’t travel together.
They live their own lives in the language and succeed or fail by their own merits, which is why we end up with these curious circumstances where the positive form has disappeared and the negative form continues on.
Singh, thanks for calling.
Oh, thank you very much.
Our pleasure, of course.
Bye-bye.
Okay, bye-bye.
