rutino

Not a female rue-plant, and it is worth saying so. Ruto is rue, the bitter herb. -In- is the suffix that makes a female one. Put them together and Esperanto's own machinery says rutino should be a lady rue bush, which it emphatically is not. This is the whole hazard of an agglutinative language read too eagerly: the parts are always there, waiting to mean something, and sometimes they are lying. Rutino is one borrowed root, and the two-part reading is a coincidence and a good joke.

There is a road inside it. French routine is a diminutive of route, and route is Latin rupta via, a broken way: a road was something you smashed through the trees, not something you laid. So a routine is a little road, a track worn by walking the same line often enough that the ground gives way. That is exactly what a routine is, and English route, rout and rupture are all the same Latin verb.

Two senses, and they pull in opposite directions. The first is positive: the facility that long practice gives you, the ability to do the job well without attending to every detail. A surgeon has rutino. The second is negative: the blind habit that makes you do the same thing the same way because you always have, and stops you seeing anything else. Both are in the dictionary, and which one you mean is carried by the sentence around it, exactly as in English.

The fence with kutimo. Kutimo at rank 294 is a habit or a custom, and it can belong to a person or a whole people. Rutino is narrower: it is about repetition producing either skill or deadness. Your morning coffee is a kutimo. The way a nurse finds a vein without looking is rutino.