Words with Ph-Th

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Susan from San Antonio, Texas. Hi, Susan. Welcome to the show.

Hello, Susan. What’s cooking? Hello. How are you doing? Good. What can we help you with? So I am a chemistry professor, and I frequently encounter a compound called phthalate, which is spelled P-H-T-H-A-L-A-T-E.

And it has a lot of related compounds, things like phallic acid, phenylsaline, and naphthalene. And this is the first time I’d encountered a word that has P-H-T-H right next to each other. So I was wondering if you could tell me where that came from or if there are other words that have that combination.

Yes, there sure are. I mean, part of what you’re dealing with there is that so many words in chemistry come from ancient Greek, right? There are actually several words, a handful of words in English that have that same P-H-T-H combination. I don’t know if you wear glasses, but if you did, you got them from your ophthalmologist, right?

That’s true, yeah. Yeah, it’s just not that uncommon in ancient Greek to have the P-H-T-H right next to each other. It’s the letters phi or phi, like in phi, beta, kappa, and theta, which is, you know, the oval with the line across it, phi and theta.

Yeah. You have, in English, ophthalmologist. You have, actually, the Greek word for leather is diphthera, which gave us the word diphtheria. Diphtheria is the way you pronounce it because part of the characteristics of that disease is that you get sort of a leathery membrane in your throat. So diphtheria comes from the Greek word for leather.

And then in linguistics, we have diphthong, which is from Greek words that mean two voices. Two voices.

Yeah. So, Susan, what words are you encountering it in? There’s a class of compounds that are called phthalates. Phthalates, okay. It’s kind of at the beginning of the word. What are they known for? What are their primary properties? What would we know about them as non-specialists?

My guess is that the original name that it came from was napsaline. And napsaline is a compound that you can isolate from oil and gas, but it’s the compound that’s in mothballs.

Okay. Sure, yeah. That’s where people might know it from, yeah. Yeah, so that puts us on another path. We know that naphtha’s got some roots in a variety of ancient languages related to tar, bitumen, things like that. Black sticky substances and goes back probably as far back as the written record goes, right?

Yep. Way back. Because it was one of those things that was recorded. And remember that the first writing isn’t love letters, it’s inventories. Inventories of like supplies. So it goes way, way back there. And that’s pretty cool that we’ve got this root in modern English words that goes back thousands of years.

Thousands, yes. Now, one of the questions our students often have is how you pronounce that, because sometimes people just abbreviate the PH as a P. So they would say naphthalene as opposed to naphthalene.

Yeah, I could see people easily leaving out that H. Yeah. Just like an amphitheater instead of amphitheater. Yeah, yeah. That one’s gaining ground, so I wouldn’t be too much of a stickler about it.

All right. Cool, Susan. Drop us a line sometime, all right? Thank you. Helium, neon, and argon walk into a bar, and the bartender says, hey, we don’t serve noble gases here. They show no reaction.

Terrible stuff. Oh, terrible. Terrible. I’m sure there’s more. You look like you have more. A neutron walks into a bar, orders a gin and tonic, and asks the bartender how much. The bartender replies, for you, no charge.

Oh, gosh. Terrible stuff. 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org.