Ditch the digraph

doi:10.1136/bmj.332.7549.1071-a

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Marcus Gore (davidmarcusgore@aol.com), resident surgical officer

St Mark's Hospital, Harrow

A surgeon uses a ligature to tie off a bleeding vessel, although the word is somewhat archaic and conjures up an image of John Hunter tying off a popliteal aneurysm. Yet lexical ligatures cast a long shadow, at least on this side of the Atlantic. Medical language is full of words containing ae and oe: although these pairs are now printed as separate vowels (digraphs), a look in an older text will reveal their earlier form as ligatures ∞ and œ. Haemoglobin and oesophagus show no signs of losing ae and oe respectively, and some august surgeons and physicians are inordinately proud of …