From time to time we parade out Engish words that sound like negatives with no positive. Usually it's by attempted counterexample: Is my hair kempt? You know, sheveled? It shouldn't be; I'm really quite ept at such matters.

Just now I came across this:



on page 333 of Stover at Yale by Owen Johnson, as preserved by Google Books.

Yes, I know it's Tonypandy, but still I got excited!

I new of the word but I have never seen it used.

Tonypandy???

Historical "fact", often as (re)written by the victors, that is not true, is rediscovered periodically to be not true, and yet the myth persists. Google Tonypandy and you'll find riots, massacre, police brutality. Far, far from the truth.

Josephine Tey's The Daughter of TIme, one of the best murder mysteries ever written [detective solves four-hundred-year-old case from his hospital bed], discusses the Tonypandy incident towards the very end of the novel.

Here's one commentator's brief description:
- (source)


And why is "'ruthful" Tonypandy? Because I'm by no means the first to encounter it in modern literature. (If you will accept 1910 as "modern.") Tsuwm has it on his wwftd page. Nevertheless -- I had never seen it used seriously either, which is the reason I got excited.

The brick and mortar OED has entries for ruth, ruthful, and ruthfully, although it labels the first two as archaic and the third as rare or obsolete. Ruth is a noun meaning "the quality of being compassionate" and the other two are what you would expect the corresponding adjective and adverb to be.

regarding Shakespeare's King Richard III, ed. by Richard Grant White (1883)

"To do this piece of ruthful butchery" : —Thus the folio. The quarto of 1597 has, "To do this ruthlesse peece of butchery ; " tlie later quartos, "To do this ruthfull peece," &c. The folio, it will be seen, gives a revised version of the line, the position of the adjective having been changed. Therefore, as the form 'ruthful' was retained on the revision, it should not be changed to 'ruthless,' as it has generally been in modern editions. 'Ruthful' is elsewhere thus used by Shakespeare, and also by other authors of his time, and later : and we now say, with the same force, either a shameful deed or a shameless deed; in one instance meaning that the act causes shame in the observer—in the other, that it shows a lack of shame in the performer. So the same act may be characterized as pitiful, sorrowful, ruthful, or pitiless, sorrowless, ruthless.

and we now say, with the same force, either a shameful deed or a shameless deed And never the twain shall cleave...