Today’s Pearls Before Swine:
Pig indulges in resurrecting “lost positives” (ruth from ruthless, gruntled from disgruntled) — there’s a site on which people nominate lost positives, often quite fancifully — but gets the morphological structure of ruthless wrong.
On the derivational suffix -less, from Michael Quinion’s affixes site:
Words in -less are nearly all adjectives. The great majority come from nouns and have the sense of lacking or being without that thing or quality: bottomless, childless, defenceless, lawless, pointless, spineless, strapless, toothless.
… The suffix is freely used to create new adjectives at need, to the extent that only a proportion of them can be recorded in dictionaries. Many are invented to fill a momentary need: girlfriendless, handbrakeless, monarchless, passwordless, sidewalkless.
(And in linguistics, r-less ‘non-rhotic’, versus r-ful ‘rhotic’ (of dialects or speakers).)
Pig is treating ruthless as based on an adjective ruth, but we should be looking for a noun ruth (so, not “We’re pretty ruth”, but “We have pretty much ruth”). And that in fact is the history. From NOAD2: ruthless ‘having or showing no pity or compassion for others’ is based on:
ruth noun archaic a feeling of pity, distress, or grief.
ORIGIN Middle English: from the verb rue [‘bitterly regret’], probably influenced by Old Norse hrygth.
May 16, 2013 at 9:43 am |
From Robert Coren in Facebook:
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Excellent choice.
May 16, 2013 at 10:02 am |
“pretty much ruth”? Is that grammatical? It isn’t for me. “Much” would be okay (for nouns describing qualities), but “pretty much” just doesn’t work. “Pretty much” has to modify a verb, and has to go before it, leaving me expecting a verb in -ed form (or equivalent).
May 28, 2013 at 12:02 pm |
“Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth:
And, O ye Dolphins, waft the hapless youth.”
From John Milton’s “Lycidas”, famously quoted by Thomas Wolfe.