Rosie writes to say that she understands that being doubtless is being “without doubt,” and that to do something effortlessly is to do it “without effort,” but she wonders if anyone can be “full of ruth” instead of being ruthless.

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I hope Rosie won’t rue the day she asked me when she hears my answer.

Oh, I guess that is the answer.

To rue something is to “regret” it and comes from some of the oldest Old English, and thus Germanic roots. We have Beowulf and King Alfred both using rue to mean “sorrow” and “regret.”

The word ruth grew out of this Old English rue and is labeled as an early Middle English word. Ruth didn’t exactly mean “sorrow” and “regret”; instead it had more of a sense of “compassion.”

You can see how the two relate, someone who was compassionate would regret causing pain to others; would be sorry about it.

So that’s the answer, a compassionate person has ruth; a ruthless person has no compassion.

Anyhow, ruth is an interesting case showing how the divisions between Old English, Middle English and Modern English are not clean and neat partitions.

I’ve said before that if you were to travel back in time and find someone speaking what you could call Middle English—that is English that had absorbed plenty of French words—if you hunted around in England a little, before long you’d find someone else who was still speaking solid Old English.

So here we have the word ruth that is Middle English principally because it doesn’t show up before 1175 and yet had Old English parentage.

What’s more the first citations for ruth are spelled with a character that is solidly Old English, one we don’t use anymore in Modern English, the letter eth.

An eth looks like a “d” with a bar through the stem and was pronounced like “th.”

The reason Old English—or in this case Middle English—used an eth at all was that when Christianity was reintroduced to England after the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons it brought literacy with it but in Latin. The speakers of Old English borrowed the Latin system of writing but found it lacking in the “th” sound that English speakers liked to use.

So they stuck in a new letter.

In fact they liked the “th” sound so much they stuck in two new “th” letters, eth and thorn.