“I don’t know!” “Third base!”
“Nu’s on first. Xi’s (she’s) on second. Omigod’s (omicron’s) on third!”
“Have you heard about the nu variant?”
“A new variant? What is it named?”
“Nu.”
“No, really, what’s its name?”
“Nu!”
“I know it’s new, you told me that already! I’m asking, what’s the variant’s name?”
“Nu!”
They didn’t ask any Jewish grandfathers before they named the zeta variant…
Moderating:
I’m not sure what you wish to accomplish with this needlessly provocative post. Moderators agree this is over the line for the ‘Don’t be a jerk’ rule. Please dial it back.
Guidance only, not a warning.
I like the notion of using font names for variants. “Covid-Comic-Sans” is delicious. I look forward to concerned news reports about the detection of yet more Serif variants.
I grant that Covid-Papyrus is really overspreading, but despite all the criticism I had it and I quite liked it.
Make it kid-friendly for educational purposes. “It’s the Elsa variant!”
COVID - New Caledonia could be confusing as well.
I guess the next one will be named “Pi”.
There’s a circular argument going around about whether it would be appropriate to assign that letter. Some think it would be trying to fit a round peg into a square hole and others the other way around.
But Pi, who doesn’t love pie?
Since nobody seems to have stepped up to be the humorless FQ nerd on this one, I guess I’ll do it:
The ubiquity of the Greek alphabet in modern science contexts is an artefact of Renaissance Hellenism in the context of early print culture. Early modern scientists were interested in the recovery and translation of ancient Greek scientific works, and humanist studies tended to involve learning Greek. So academic printers created Greek typefaces to print ancient Greek texts.
That meant that as symbolic notation developed in scientific writing, the Greek alphabet supplied a convenient set of symbols that were widely recognized but not easily confused with roman letters.
And the Greek alphabet has remained a central part of scientific notation ever since, in fields from mathematics to physics to biology to psychology.
Yeah, unless it just defaults to “this year’s covid shot” like “this year’s flu shot”, etc. I have never known the official designation of any year’s flu strain, I just go and get the annual jab.
It should be noted that Omicron is one of the least used Greek letters in those various sciences. In fact, the only one I can think of is in Bayern designations of stars. Bayern designations are the ones that combine a Greek letter with the Latin genitive of the constellation name. Alpha Centauri is by far the best known of them, and some people will be familiar with the designations of other bright stars which are almost all Alphas or Betas. SF fans will be familiar with some others, such as Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, because they’re nearby stars that are used as the locations of stories.
Bayern designations use the entire Greek alphabet, so there are Omicron-stars for almost all constellations. But for other uses, Omicron looks too much like either an O or a zero, so it’s rarely used.