Some time ago I wrote about the word ruthless and the just-word ruthful. I didn’t mention the word ruth, which means pity or compassion; sorrow or grief; self-reproach, contrition or remorse (Dictionary.com). It is derived from rue (feel sorrow, repent, regret).
Recently Youtube suggested a video of Seven part-songs by Gustav Holst (as compared with Seven-part songs).
Number 5, titled Sorrow and joy includes the line And she [sorrow, personified] with ruth will teach you truth. The video doesn’t list an author, but the internet found Robert Bridges, who I know enough about to know that he used older words at times. The final verse is:
Blush not nor blench with either wench,
Make neither brag nor pother:
God send you, son, enough of one
And not too much o’ t’other.
(Pother and t’other don’t rhyme in my pronunciation, if I ever pronounced them.)
(In another verse he rhymes med’cin and heads in.)
Any searches for ruth or “ruth” (in quotation marks for an exact match) are dominated by the biblical woman and book, other women with the same name, the name itself and a famous baseball player, the origin of whose surname is unexplained. Searches for “his ruth” and “her ruth” find references to the biblical story and modern reflections on it. Incidentally, the name comes from Hebrew רְעוּת (re’ut): companion and is unrelated to the Germanic rue, ruth, but there is obviously an overlap in concept. Wikipedia’s article says that Ruth was one of the first Old Testament names to be widely used, possibly because of its double meaning with the English word.
“their ruth” found actual uses – from 400 years ago. David and Ben Crystal’s Shakespeare’s Words site shows four examples:
Coriolanus I.i.195 [Martius to Menenius] Would the nobility lay aside their ruth / And let me use my sword
Richard II III.iv.106 [Gardener to his men] Rue even for ruth here shortly shall be seen
Sonnet 132.4 [of his lover’s eyes] Looking with pretty ruth upon my pain
Troilus and Cressida V.iii.48 [Troilus to Hector, of their swords] Spur them to ruthful work, rein them from ruth!
(No doubt other sites of Shakespeare’s words would list these too, but this site came first in the results, so I’ll credit and link it.) Note that in two uses, he pairs the more familiar rue and the possibly-better-known-at-the-time-than-now ruthful. The search results for ruthful show dictionaries and a post on English Language Thoughts, which I referred to in my original post.
About half the dictionaries on the first page of the search results mark ruth as archaic; the others don’t. So can people use it to mean pity now? I doubt it. I’m not immediately sure how I might work it into a conversation. (Note that pity is a noun and verb, while ruth is only a noun. We can’t ruth people.)
Never Pure and Rarely Simple 