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What’s in a name?

A lot, it seems.

After all, when you name a baby, the poor kid’s stuck with it unto death or legal name change, whichever occurs first. So proceed with caution.

Now let’s skip the (formerly sexist, now egalitarian) naming of hurricanes, and go straight to the latest Covid-19 variant, dubbed “Omicron.”

CNN explains here, “Since May the World Health Organization has been using letters of the Greek alphabet, in order, to name coronavirus variants. Delta was the most dominant one, followed by eight others — including Epsilon, Iota and Lambda — that so far have mostly fizzled out.”

The story continues, “So after a new variant with the unwieldy scientific name of B.1.1.529 was discovered last week in South Africa, observers might have expected WHO to name it after the next Greek letter on the list: Nu. But the health agency skipped Nu, along with the letter after that — Xi — and instead went straight to Omicron — the 15th letter in the Greek alphabet.” See chart immediately below.

Now why is that? Because “‘Nu’ is too easily confounded with ‘new’ and Xi was not used because it is a common surname,” the organization explained in an emailed statement to CNN.” Xi also happens to be the name of China’s dictator, who’s been stirring up trouble, and you don’t want to give Trump a “China virus.” So that took them to Omicron, which avoided those problems. But they didn’t check out the anagram.

ăn′ə-grăm″

noun

    1. A word or phrase formed by reordering the letters of another word or phrase, such as satin to stain.
    2. A game in which players form words from a group of randomly picked letters.
    3. A transposition of the letters of a word or sentence, to form a new word or sentence: thus, Galenus is an anagram of angelus.

If you rearrange the letters in omicron, you get:

moronic

This is an unfortunate happenstance, because you can see what the anti-vax morons will say when the government asks people to get booster shots, can’t you? They should’ve called it “Sigma,” but it’s too late now. Like the Omicron variant, the anagram is “out of the barn.”

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0 Comments Add Yours ↓

  1. Mark Adams #
    1

    The WHO should have used the next letter of the Greek alphabet as what do they do when the end of th alphabet is reached…do they go back and use those skipped letters or go with alpha alpha Covid. The choice dog food of those who need to feed Cerebus.

  2. Roger Rabbit #
    2

    Maybe they wanted to send a message to people who still won’t get vaccinated.