I became curious why there are more PH words cropping up in our vocabulary. Are we in the midst of a PH phenomenon, pun intended? Have you heard of PHO, Phishing, Phreaking and more?
First I checked out the derivation of the ph sound etymologically-speaking. Ph is an old English sound of ‘F’ originally from the Greek Letter (phi), a symbol that is not found on our keyboards. We are familiar with other ph words like phone (shortened telephone), phonetics, phonics and many more. Many of those are also formed from Greek words. PH can also be the symbol for hydrogen which could lead to another discussion on PH balance however, I won’t go there today. But did you know that there are now two text abbreviations for PH which can mean either ‘power hug’ or ‘pantyhose’?
Now for the aforementioned PH words actual meanings. Pho’ is a Vietnamese noodle soup popularized in Viet Nam which spread to the world by refugees after the Viet Nam war. Phishing is a combination of fishing and phreaking which has come to mean online fraud of financial information when posing as a legitimate company. Phreaking is a portmanteau of fishing and freaking combining both words to mean hacking into telecom networks to make free calls.
So I guess people are just playing with words, combining them and coming up with new words. Certainly we have many more words than we had fifty years ago! I guess we can all come up with our own words! My mother combined perhaps and maybe and often answered us with a perbe or mayhaps. Pheople just got to have phun with our language I guess!