If you're looking for discussion of other (o)e or (a)e words, please click here to see/comment at the more comprehensive post on the topic. So, as we've seen in that aforementioned blog post, British and American spelling differ sometimes in the use of the ligature (connected letter)
œ, or as it's more often written now, the digraph (two letters for one sound)
oe. To give a quick summary of the story so far:
- English took a lot of its œ words from Latin.
- Latin got them from Greek. œ is Latin's way of representing the Greek oɩ.
- American English (following Noah Webster and other spelling reformers) usually simplifies the Latin/Greek oe to e.
But then there's
foetus (or
fœtus). This is a British spelling of the Latin word
fetus. That is to say, the
œ might look like it comes from a classical language, but it just doesn't. Sometime in the 16th century, someone (mistakenly, one might say) started spelling it with an
œ, and it stuck.
This creates a dilemma for British spellers who know a bit about Latin. Spell it
foetus and commit a little etymological crime. Spell it
fetus and get accused of Americanization by people who don't know about the Latin--and maybe even by some who do know about it. And if there's one thing worse than committing Latin sins, it's being accused of spelling like an American.
But still, brave British doctors have fought to get rid of the
o, mostly by writing letters to the editor of major medical journals. Here's one:
I shall resist to the last ditch any movement for the general replacement of diphthongs* by single vowels – the American practice. But when, etymologically, the foreigner is correct and we are wrong, it would seem that by adhering obstinately to a false diphthong we are weakening our case for maintaining our justifiable diphthongs in the face of contrary “common usage” by far more than half the English-writing world. (Napier, L. Everard. 1 Nov. 1952. The correct spelling of medical terms [Letter to the Editor]. The Lancet vol. 260, pp. 885-6.)
The Lancet and the
British Medical Journal now consider
fetus and
fetal the ‘correct’ spellings
, and the
Oxford Dictionaries entry for
fetus remarks:
The spelling foetus has no etymological basis but is recorded from the 16th century and until recently was the standard British spelling in both technical and non-technical use. In technical usage fetus is now the standard spelling throughout the English-speaking world, but foetus is still found in British English outside technical contexts.
At the
foetus entry, it just says: "Variant spelling of
fetus (chiefly in British non-technical use)."
How true is this, that it's the accepted technical spelling in the UK? In
The Lancet and the
BMJ, it's doctors writing for other doctors. What about the rest of the medical professions? What about when medical types communicate with patients?
My first stop was the
NHS Choices website, where the readers are would-be patients. A search for
foetus brings up 27 hits, but
fetus has 7. But, going the other way,
foetal has 66 hits and
fetal 82. What's going on?
I contacted the website to ask if they had a policy on this and they were
extremely helpful (as the
NHS always has been for me ♥♥♥). They put me in contact with their Head of Editorial Production, who sent me both
a link to their style guide (which has
fetus as an Americanism to be avoided) and his own document entitled 'Fetality', which he wrote when the
Fetal Anomaly Screening Programme (so spelled) asked if the rest of the website could switch to
fetal/
fetus. In his paper he gives several arguments for retaining
foetus/
foetal, even on pages where it will conflict with the FASP program(me)'s spelling, but I think this first one is key:
NHS Choices is a ‘British English’ service and, as stated in its Editorial Style Guide, is bound to:
· Write plain English
· Avoid medical jargon and technical terms as far as possible
On the basis of those two points, if it is accepted that foetus is the general spelling and fetus the technical-medical, NHS Choices should use foetus.
(Bolton, Barry. 2014. Fetality. Internal document, NHS. Received with thanks from the author.)
Looking again at the
o-less hits on the NHS Choices site, many of them seem to be in comments from site users--so the house style doesn't apply. Are they misspelling it, or do they know the 'technical' spelling? Why so many more
fetals? Possibly because it's in the name of a lot of things, not just the FASP program(me), such as the 'Fetal Medicine Unit team at St George's Hospital', which is indeed how the hospital spells that unit's name.
It's an interesting mixture: the NHS website keeps the traditional British spelling in communication with patients in order to avoid technical language, but the hospitals and such seem quite happy to foist the technical spelling on patients in the names of units and program(me)s.
To investigate this a little further, I did a little survey in which I asked for UK medical personnel to tell me which spelling they would use in a work context:
foetus or
fetus,
sulphur or
sulfur and
amoeba or
ameba.
F(o)etus was the only one that respondents disagreed about:
(The 'it depends' person gave that answer for every question and said they'd use the American spelling if they were writing to an American.)
I invited respondents to explain their preferences to me, but unfortunately only four did, and two of those used the space to tell me about words I hadn't asked about. The two relevant comments were:
I am an allied health professional who wouldn't use these words much in my work, but these were how I was taught to spell them at school. I've heard in the past that "foetus" is completely wrong, though I can't quite remember why and I write the word so infrequently that I wouldn't change my spelling of it anyway!
and apparently not knowing about the etymology of fetus:
Homogenisation of the English language to accommodate American English is a pernicious assault on the richness and diversity of English usage. It shouldn't be tolerated!
Unfortunately, I didn't ask for demographic information beyond country of abode, so I can't see whether the people who prefer
fetus are in professions in which they need the word more often than the ones who prefer
foetus.
But my impression is that
fetus/fetal seems to be something of a medical shibboleth in the UK now. Doctors use the
e spelling and it sets them apart as 'in the know', and maybe they don't mind that the rest of the country goes about putting the
o in it. All the better to tell who the truly educated are. I'd love to hear from people 'in the know' in the comments. Have I got that wrong?
And before I leave, a note about the other false etymological form that readers of
The Lancet (well, at least one) have tried to change. Here's another letter to the editor:
SIR,-Spelling is a curious blend of phonetics, etymology, tradition, and nonsense ; we should take care not to let the last preponderate. Dr. Napier (Nov. 1) is to be congratulated on his attack on the absurd o which it is customary now to insert into fetus. I would like to raise support for a similar attack on the ph with which we generally mis-spell sulfur and the other words derived from it. Sulfur comes from a Latin word. Undeniably some Latin authors used the ph form, but there is good reason to think that this was a blunder, and most of the European languages that use the Latin root have not followed the erroneous spelling. The spelling sulfur was common in Britain from the 14th to 18th centuries, and this presumably explains its present day use in the U.S.A. It is in no sense an American innovation. (Pirie, N.W. 15 Nov. 1952.The correct spelling of medical terms [Letter to the Editor]. The Lancet vol. 260, pp.987-8.)
The argument for
sulfur seems not to have been heard—
sulphur still rules Britannia absolutely.
Footnote *It's a digraph, not a diphthong, but what do doctors know?
In other news...
Votes, please? I failed to be self-promotional enough to make it to the voting round for Bab.la's Top Language Lovers blog competition this year. (I foolishly assumed being nominated was enough to get to the voting round.) But I did get to the finals for my Twitter feed, under my name (Lynne Murphy), rather than my Twitter handle (@lynneguist). But if you (BrE)
fancy helping me out with a vote (or sabotaging me with a vote against!), please click
here to go to the voting page.
Thanks for reading to the bottom--this is longer than the (BrE)
first-year essays I assign!
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