For some time now The Royal Society of Chemistry, which is obviously a British organisation, has recommended the use of sulfur as the spelling for sulphur. (This has the knock on effect of also meaning using the forms sulfate and sulfite for naming compounds containing respectively the sulphate and sulphite ions; or hydrogensulfite and hydrogensulfate for what before more systematic naming came about used to be known as the bisulphite and bisulphate ions.)

I have now learned that the SQA, the Scottish Qualifications Authority, (my italics) – again domiciled within these islands – will also be taking up this egregious practice.

The imposition is of course an American usage and is I suppose being introduced on the grounds that sulphur is easier to spell this way. But is it?

I agree that Americans – and increasingly we Brits – do write fantasy for phantasy but on this side of the Atlantic we do still tend to cling on to phantasm rather than fantasm.

Yet do Americans write of fotografs or fotons? They seem to manage those all right while using ph.

What is so special about sulphur that singles it out for this treatment?

And why not go the whole hog, here, and spell it sulfer to make it more like it sounds?

I do admit some people confuse it with silver – though since silver is a greyish metal and sulphur a yellow non-metal I can’t for the life of me see why. I think the “new” spelling will only make such confusion worse, though.

But whatever next?

Will we be forced to adopt aluminum?

Can we perhaps look forward to spelling the main ingredient of carbolic soap as fenol? Or the acid-alkali indicator as fenolfthalein?

Will element number 15 be known in the future as fosforus? (No, of course not. Its symbol is P and it only ever gets confused with potassium – which for historical reasons has the symbol K. F is in any case already taken as the symbol for fluorine.)

It’s all nonsense. Stop it.

Now.

I for one will not be changing my spelling practices.

Accept no substitute. Stand up for ph.