COVID-19 variant names

SARS-CoV-2

As I write this, the omicron variant of the Covid (Sars-CoV-2) is peaking in the U.S., but no one believes it will be the last variant of this deadly disease. But why "omicron"? 

The World Health Organization (WHO) decided in May 2021 that its nomenclature for important strains in the Sars-CoV-2 variant classification would adopt Greek-letter names. WE use those letters to label hurricanes and tropical storms after we run out of the letters in our own English alphabet - which happened this past season. 

I found an article from the WHO titled "WHO announces simple, easy-to-say labels for SARS-CoV-2 Variants of Interest and Concern." But this naming is not so simple or easy to say.

The switch to Greek for names was to end associating place-of-origin names (“Wuhan virus,” “South African variant”) which was criticized as being xenophobic and racist. They didn't want to put the blame on a country or region.

The other place that some people learn the Greek alphabet is in the naming of fraternities and sororities. So many of us have learned some of the letters.

The letters of the Greek alphabet are alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, zeta, eta, theta, iota, kappa, lambda, mu, nu, xi, omicron, pi, rho, sigma, tau, upsilon, phi, chi, psi, omega.

Wait - how did we jump from the delta variant all the way to omicron?

It turns out that when what we call the omicron variant appeared, the WHO had already used up 12 of the Greek alphabet’s letters. These “variants of interest” thankfully didn't develop enough to hit the general public and the media. Next should have been "Nu." You see a problem with that letter. How do we differentiate a "Nu variant" from a "new variant"?

That makes sense. So, next is "Xi."  Nope. That one looks like a common Chinese family name. I'm sure Chinese President Xi Jinping and many others are happy to not have a variant with their name. 

There is also the issue of pronunciation with the Greek letters. For example, "xi" is pronounced in Greek as "zy" (like xylophone) and it is usually transliterated in English as  "she." 

I would assume that the next variant would be "Pi" but I read something today that said next will be "Omega" which is the big "O" compared to small "o" omicron. That sounds ominous. And what happened to pi, rho, sigma, tau, upsilon, phi, chi, and psi?

When the Delta variant hit hard last summer, Delta Air Lines was not very happy. I actually saw a witty tweet response from the airline's own chief health officer, Dr. Henry Ting: "We prefer to call it the B.1.617.2 variant since that is so much more simple to say and remember.”

Going back to when all this started, why was it COVID-19? The illness caused by the SARS-CoV-2 was given the acronym COVID-19 by the WHO to represent "coronavirus disease 2019." The "19" for the year, not because it was the 19th version of it. This name was also chosen to avoid stigmatizing any populations, geography, or animal (like a bird or swine flu) associations that had occurred in the past and still happen occasionally.

SARS-CoV-2 is the acronym + abbreviation used to label “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2” which was given in February 2020. This name was chosen because the virus is genetically related to the coronavirus responsible for the SARS outbreak of 2003. While related, the two viruses are different.

Radar and Microwave Ovens

RADAR was coined in 1940 by the United States Navy as an acronym for RAdio Detection And Ranging (or RAdio Direction And Ranging). The term radar has since been used in English and other languages as a common noun, losing all capitalization.

Radar is a technology based on the principle that radio waves can bounce off the surfaces of large objects. A radio wave beam pointed in one direction will bounce back at the source if they encounter an obstruction in their path. For radar detection, measuring the bounced-back radio waves can indicate distant objects or objects hidden from view by clouds or fog can be detected. Radar was used to detect planes and ships, and later weather patterns since rainstorms also caused interference that could be measured.

But what does that have to do with microwave ovens? Amana, a subsidiary of Raytheon corporation, called their first model the “Radarange” (radar + range, as in stove). Do microwave ovens use radar?

During World War II, the American military needed more magnetrons for radar installations, and Raytheon was given the assignment. By redesigning the magnetron so that components could be punched out from sheet metal, mass production of magnetrons was increased dramatically.

When an engineer was working with a live magnetron, he noticed that a candy bar in his pocket had started to melt. He thought that the radio waves from the magnetron caused the heating. After further testing, including popping corn, Raytheon filed for a patent for using radar technology for cooking. An oven using radar technology was made.

Though microwaves has been used for commercial food preparation since the 1950s, 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the first Amana ovens sold for home use in 1967.

NIMBY

NIMBY is an acronym meaning "Not In My BackYard." It appears in stories about a neighborhood protesting the location of a new unwanted project in their area.

Many such "undesirable" projects are attached to its use. A list on Wikipedia includs: low cost housing development, skyscrapers, homeless shelters, oil wells, chemical plants, industrial parks, military bases, fracking, wind turbines, desalination plants, landfill sites, incinerators, power plants, quarries, prisons, pubs, adult entertainment clubs, firearms dealers, mobile phone masts, electricity pylons, abortion clinics, children's homes, nursing homes, youth hostels, sports stadiums, betelnut vendors, shopping malls, retail parks, railways, roads, airports, seaports, nuclear waste repositories, storage for weapons of mass destruction, and cannabis dispensaries and recreational cannabis shops.

Whether it is a new garbage dump or energy plant, this acronym is a pejorative characterization of opposition by residents. Often that opposition is not to the need for such facilities, but just that it should be further away from their neighborhood. The residents are often called Nimbies and their state of mind is called Nimbyism.

The NIMBY concept i sometimes also applied to people who advocate a proposal, such as budget cuts, but oppose implementing it in a way that might affect their lives or require any sacrifice on their part.

The acronym's earliest use is listed as being in 1980 in the Christian Science Monitor. However, the OED  notes that the term was already used in the hazardous waste industry. It is probable that people were using the phrase "Not in my backyard" much earlier than the acronym.

SMART cars

smart Fortwo cabriolet - CC BY-SA 3.0,

smart Automobile is a division of Daimler AG that manufactures and markets the smart Fortwo and smart Forfour. The official trademarked name is stylized as "smart", with all lowercase letters.

“Smart” sounds like a good name for cars that are meant to be small, smartly designed city cars. But it turns out that despite the lowercase letter, this name is an acroym.

The early development of the brand and styling was a venture of Swatch and Mercedes and thus the name reflects the idea of Swatch Mercedes ART.

The corporate branding uses lowercase logotype for the "smart" and a visual logo incorporating the letter "c" for "compact" and an arrow for "forward thinking".


By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use

xoxo hugs, kisses and SWAK

When and why did x's and o's become a symbol for hugs and kisses?

xoxo (generally lowercase letters) is a way to express love or good friendship at the end of a written letter - and now in email and SMS text messages.

Which letter represents which action? That is not actually clear, but the custom of placing "X" on envelopes, notes and at the bottom of letters to mean kisses dates back to the Middle Ages.

The symbol x is the letter taw in early Hebrew (and in Ezekiel, a mark set “upon the foreheads” of men) and chi in Greek. A Christian cross was used on medieval documents or letters to mean faith and honesty. It can still be seen on Medieval churches as a symbol of Christ and is why we sometimes see Christmas written as Xmas.

The Chi Rho is one of the earliest forms of christogram, and is formed by superimposing the first two (capital) letters chi and rho (ΧΡ) of the Greek word "ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ" = KRistos = Christ to produce the monogram.

It is said that the pronunciation of the letter "X" in Spanish, though generally transliterated as equis, sounds like a native Spanish speaker saying "a kiss" in English.

The x also became the signature of choice in the Middle Ages since most of the common people could not read or write. A literal kiss would be placed upon the cross of a letter by the signer as a display of their sworn oath. Documents sealed with an x embossed in wax or lead (letters, books, oaths of political and economic fealty between kings and their vassals)were "sealed with a kiss.”

Much later, the acronym SWAK became popular during World War I for soldiers to imprint on their letters home.

There is speculation that the use of o may be of a more modern American origin. When arriving in the United States, Jewish immigrants, most of whose first language was Yiddish, would use an 'O' to sign documents, rather than the Christian X as a sign of the cross. Immigration inspectors called anyone who signed with an “o” “a kikel [circle in Yiddish] or kikeleh [little circle], which was shortened to kike,” and eventually took on a derogatory meaning.


Still, the origin of O as a hug and the combining of X and O is debatable.

Some interpret X as the crossed arms of a hug and O as the puckered lips of a kiss. How about X representing the four lips of a kiss and O the four arms of a hug?

The Oxford English Dictionary states that X is "used to represent a kiss, esp. in the subscription to a letter."

Some sources say that, based on the pronunciation of the letters, X sounds like 'kiss' and O sounds like 'hold', as in 'I hold you'.

CARE packages

What’s a care package? It's a package you send to show you care about someone. We send them to soldiers abroad and to our kids at college.

But when it is a CARE (all caps) package, you're going back to the origin of the term.

CARE packages were sent by the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe to Americans in Europe as it was still recovering from WWII.

That organization changed its name to Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere. Their focus is not on packages but on bigger development efforts.

The term “care package” has survived in its broader sense.

SNAFU and FUBAR

Two terms that are related by both their use of an obscenity and in their origin stories are the acronyms SNAFU and FUBAR.

The industrialization of the American military in the 1940s during World War II pushed many new acronyms into the English vocabulary.

New technologies with complicated names often leads to the creation of simplified terms like RADAR, SONAR, SCUBA.

The military has been a major source of acronyms and abbreviations and that's true of these two.

SNAFU: Situation Normal, All Fucked Up - a reference to the general chaos and horror of the battlefield.

FUBAR: Fucked Up Beyond All Repair/Recognition - like SNAFU, the acronym FUBAR dates back to World War II and described a thing or situation in which things were beyond hope - although in a wartime military setting that doesn't mean you didn't have to deal with it.

TASER

A taser (without capitalization) is a weapon firing barbs attached by wires to batteries, causing temporary paralysis. We have even turned it into a verb, as in "Don't tase me, bro!"

But I saw TASER listed as an acronym, so I did some digging about its origin.

Jack Cover, a NASA researcher, began developing the Taser in 1969 and completed the device in 1974. The "Taser Public Defender" used gunpowder as its propellant, which meant it was classified as a firearm in 1976. Later improvements by the company Taser International to make the "Air Taser," made the U.S. firearms regulator, the ATF, change the classification to it not being a firearm.

In 2003, Taser International released a new weapon called the Taser X26, which used "shaped pulse technology" and in 2009 they released the X3, which can fire three shots before reloading.

Much more interesting to me is that Jack Cover created the name of his weapon from from reading one of the popular, pulp-fiction novels about Tom Swift. Fictional character Tom Swift is the protagonist of a series of books that were similar to the later Hardy Boys but with Tom inventing what in the time would be considered science-fiction. I read a number of these books as a kid and recall his "electric rifle."

The electric rifle was a gun that fires bolts of electricity and could be calibrated to different levels of range, intensity and lethality. It could shoot through solid walls without leaving a hole, but also kill an animal or human. The globe of light that it shot was compared to ball lightning.

Jack Cover came up with TASER which stands for Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle. This refers to the weapons marketed by Taser International. That middle initial (the 'A') was not part of  Tom's name in the books, but added to created a pronounceable acronym.

"Police issue X26 TASER-white" by Junglecat - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons.

Acronyms

I was flipping through the The American Heritage Abbreviations Dictionary of Acronyms and Abbreviations Including Cyberspeak (go ahead and laugh) and I decided it was time to add some acronyms to the site.

An acronym is an abbreviation but not an abbreviation. It is formed from the initial components in a phrase or a word BUT pronouned as a word without periods rather than as a string of letter. Usually these components are individual letters or parts of words or names.

So the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is NATO and is pronounced nay-toe rather than as N, A, T, O. and AIDS meaning Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome is a word rather than A.I.D.S.

There is some consensus but no universal standardization of various names for such abbreviations and of their orthographic styling. In English, they are much more common in the 20th century. any products and organizations deliberately create names so that the result is able to be pronounced as a word.

ASAP is pronounced A- SAP and stands for As Soon As Possible. It was often used in the military and in hospitals.

AWOL, Absent Without Official Leave, is a common acronym that has gone beyond its original military meaning. Nowadays, we use the acronym to mean that someone has gone missing without letting anyone know why and possibly without "permission."  (Not to be confused with the military abbreviation MIA for "missing in action" which is often what we mean when we say someone’s gone “AWOL.”

Sometimes acronyms go into such common usage that the original words represented by the letters are forgotten and the capitalized letters are printed in lowercase. Here are some common examples of that.

LASER - Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation - is treated as a word rather than an acronym.

RADAR = Radio Detection And Ranging.

SCUBA = Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus

SWAT = Special Weapons And Tactics, as in those SWAT teams of police, FBI or military that we see on TV and in films.

Mr. ZIP promoted the use of ZIP codes for the USPS during the 1960s and 1970s.

In the U.K. and Australia, there are postcodes and in Canada, postal codes. In the U.S., we had a zone system. I grew up in a part of New Jersey and I lived in Zone 11. Eventually, the zones were too populous to be useful for addressses and the postal service. For efficiency, a  Zone Improvement Plan was put in place as the U.S. Postal Service’s scheme for improving their mail delivery codes. Zipping the speed of mail delivery gave us Zip Codes that narrowed down the location.

Since 1963, the term ZIP, has suggested that the mail travels more efficiently, and therefore more quickly (zipping along), when senders use the code in the postal address. The basic format consists of five decimal numerical digits. An extended ZIP+4 code, introduced in 1983, includes the five digits of the ZIP code, a hyphen, and four additional digits that determine a more specific location within a given ZIP code. The USPS provides a free online lookup tool for ZIP codes at www.usps.com/zip4/.

As with many acronyms, usage rules have evolved. The term ZIP code was originally registered as a servicemark (a type of trademark) by the U.S. Postal Service, but its registration has since expired. The original USPS style for ZIP is all caps, although style sheets for some publications use sentence case or lowercase now.

Posh

The job of etymologists (not those buggy entomologists) in studying the history of words and their origins and how they have changed over time is not an easy one. Sometimes it seems almost impossible to nail down the definitive origin - as I have discovered in doing this blog.

One word origin I have seen multiple times is for the word, posh.

The story most often given for its origin comes from ship travel. When people went from Britain to India on ships in the early 1900s, it supposedly was an acronym of “Port Out, Starboard Home.” Someone who had a cabin on the port side on the outward trip, and the starboard side on the return trip, would have the sea breeze and be sheltered from the sun on the hottest part of the journey (Suez Canal and the Red Sea).

The posh people were obviously the wealthiest passengers who had POSH stamped on their ticket.

Researchers also point to an earlier reference in an 1892 novel, The Diary of a Nobody which includes a Posh character: “Frank called, but said he could not stop, as he had a friend waiting outside for him, named Murray Posh, adding he was quite a swell.

There's also the phrase from way back in the 16th century - pish posh. The Word Detective says it's just one form of a gentle dismissal. "Pish posh, who cares about word origins. Post something about bands!"

ABBA

ABBA are a Swedish pop group formed in Stockholm in 1972. "Abba" is "father" in Hebrew but the band claims that to be totally unintentional. They say the name is an acronym for the first names of the band members: Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid (Frida). This acronym of a name is also a palindrome. 

ABBA in 1974 (from left): Benny Andersson, Anni-Frid Lyngstad (Frida), Agnetha Fältskog, and Björn Ulvaeus - Image: AVRO - FTA001019454_012 from Beeld & Geluid wiki, CC BY-SA 3.0 nl, Link

They are one of the most popular and successful musical groups of all time and are one of the best-selling music acts in the history of popular music.

In 1974, ABBA were Sweden's first winner of the Eurovision Song Contest with the song "Waterloo", which in 2005 was chosen as the best song in the competition's history as part of the 50th anniversary celebration of the contest.

In November 2021, the group received a Grammy nomination for Record of the Year. The single, "I Still Have Faith in You", from the album, Voyage, was their first ever nomination.

Gold: Greatest Hits (mp3 download)
The Definitive Collection (mp3)
ABBA - Gold: Greatest Hits (CD)
The Definitive Collection (CD)
Number Ones
The Albums
More ABBA Gold: More ABBA Hits
Super Trouper
Arrival
ABBA
ABBA: The Movie [Blu-ray]
Abba - In Concert 1979
Voulez-Vous
The Visitors
Thank You for the Music
Ring Ring