So it’s a robot update on Hans Christian Andersen’s Red Shoes?
Only in a kinda, sorta way. Anderson’s tale is of a woman punished for her pride. No partner is involved. And she is absolved in the end, although she does die and then taken to heaven.
Were the forced-dancing shoes in the Porky Pig cartoon “The Wearing of the Grin” inspired by the Andersen tale or is it a trope with more than one folklore source?
It is kind of a trope in fairy tales. The first I can think of is the original telling of “Snow White” by the brothers Grimm, where the evil queen, on Snow White’s and the Prince’s wedding, is forced to put on red hot iron shoes and dances herself to death. That part usually is skipped in Disney’s and other retellings.
A film version of The Red Shoes came out just a couple years before the cartoon, so it’s a fairly safe bet that’s where the idea came from.
Do you know about the dancing plague of 1518?:
Note that there were other such things.
A lot of modern retellings of fairy tales are sanitized from the original version. For instance, most modern versions of Cinderella omit the self-mutilation that is part of the Grimm brothers’ version.
That article specifically mentions red shoes as an attempted cure for the mania; I’m now certain Andersen was referencing this.
I recently learned that, as well as being a name, Ruth is a word - meaning empathy (or remorse). So I guess it’s one of those women’s names which derive from a desirable (or desired) personality trait, like Constance or Prudence.
Of course, if you don’t have ruth, that makes you ruthless.
j
ETA: od course, this is complicated by it also being a biblical name.
(misread previous, n.m.)
To be fair, I have danced quite a few days - with some sleep breaks - under the influence of the ergot related triptamine lysergic acid diethylamide for several days, around 8 to 24 hours at a time. Short breaks, like 2 to 4 hours.
English rue is to ruth as true is to truth. Only that ruth has essentially left the modern language.
I kissed a girl named Ruth about 25 years ago.
But we also have ruthless and ruthful in English, the word is not gone.
Also to the point of your post, I rue the day that these words leave the language
The origin of the two words pronounced and spelled “ruth” are different. Ruth is a name in the Hebrew Bible and hence in the Christian Old Testament. There’s a book in them called “The Book of Ruth”, since it’s about a woman named Ruth who is (according to the book) an ancestor of King David, for instance. It started to become a common name among Christians in the Europe at the time of the Protestant Reformation. Before then it was already a common name among Jews there. It peaked as a common name in the U.S. in the early twentieth century.
The word “ruth” goes back to Old English and even further back to at least the Old Germanic branch of Proto-Indoeuropean. All those word mentioned - rue, ruthless, etc. - come from the same root.
“Rutherford” is apparently related to neither, being derived from Old English/ Scottish for a cattle ford.
Ruthenium, atomic number 44, is named after Ruthenia, the old Latin name of Russia. I am sure that Russia is not named after anything related to empathy. And remorse? Hm… no. Not really.
That would be from the Nordic Rus tribe, probably from the word for “rowers” (think Vikings).
The Hebrew spelling, and thence, pronunciation, of the Anglicized “Ruth” looks a little less similar to the English word.
רוּת is close to English “root”, isn’t it (acknowledging that the “r” is different in Hebrew)? @Alessan ? @Babale ?
Also saw this in the Wiktionary entry for “Ruth” and thought it interesting:
Interjection
רוּת • (rut)
- (radio telecommunications, especially military) roger
Therefore the name Ruthenia is completely artificial, made up Latin and has nothing to do with rowers, rowing or oars. For instance, “the rowers rowed with oars” would be in Latin: remiges remis remigabant (as per the internet, my Latin is not so good). I see no way to get to Ruthenia from there via the usual vocal and consonant shifts.