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.

epiphanies

 

Epiphany (also known as Theophany in Eastern Christian traditions) is a Christian feast day that celebrates the revelation of God incarnate as Jesus Christ. In Western Christianity, the feast commemorates principally (but not solely) the visit of the Magi to the Christ Child, and thus Jesus Christ's physical manifestation to the Gentiles. It is sometimes called Three Kings' Day, and in some traditions celebrated as Little Christmas. For Catholics, the Feast of Epiphany is celebrated on January 6. In the Greek New Testament manuscripts, epiphaneia refers also to Christ's second coming.

Though my family celebrated this holiday, the meaning that I am more likely to invoke during the year comes from my study of literature.

Epiphany in literature refers generally to a visionary moment when a character has a sudden insight or realization that changes their understanding of themselves or their comprehension of the world. 

James Joyce first borrowed the religious term "Epiphany" and adopted it into a profane literary context in Stephen Hero which was an early version of his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In that manuscript, Stephen Daedalus defines epiphany as "a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself."

Epiphanies in common usage are any moments of revelation, oftentimes not literary or religious at all. "As he was reviewing his portfolio, he suddenly had an epiphany about investing."

The word "epiphany" descends from the ancient Greek ἐπῐφᾰ́νειᾰ (epipháneia), meaning a "manifestation or appearance." You can break it down into the Greek words "pha" (to shine), "phanein" (to show, to cause to shine), and "epiphanein" (to manifest, to bring to light).

The pre-Christian Greeks used the word to describe the visible manifestation of a god or goddess to mortal eyes, which is a form of theophany. Early Christians adopted the term to describe the manifestation of the newborn Jesus to the Magi.

android, automaton, gynoid, fembot

 

Actroid - by Gnsin, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

An android is a humanoid robot or other artificial beings. Typically, they are made from a flesh-like material to resemble a real person. Though the word and idea come from science fiction in print and on screens, advances in robot technology now allow the design of functional and realistic humanoid robots.

The word "android" has been used to refer to robotic humanoids regardless of apparent gender, but the Greek prefix "andr-" refers to man in the masculine sense. The word has a long usage history.

• The OED has the earliest use (as "Androides") to Ephraim Chambers' 1728 Cyclopaedia, in reference to an automaton that St. Albertus Magnus allegedly created.
• The late 1700s: androides are elaborate mechanical devices resembling humans performing human activities which were displayed in exhibit halls.
• "android" appears in US patents as early as 1863 in reference to miniature human-like toy automatons which are machines that do human actions and may or may not resemble a human. The word "automaton" is the Latinization of the Ancient Greek αὐτόματον, automaton, (neuter) meaning "acting of one's own will." The word was first used by Homer to describe automatic door opening, or automatic movement of wheeled tripods
• A distinction between mechanical robots and fleshy androids was popularized by Edmond Hamilton's Captain Future stories (1940–1944).
• Karel Čapek's robots in the play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots, 1921) introduced the word robot to the world. But "robot" has come to primarily refer to mechanical devices which also may look like humans or animals but can also be just a humanlike arm or hand that performs a task, such as assembling a vehicle. "Robotess" is the oldest female-specific term and was used by Rossum, though it was not used widely beyond his play.

The term "droid" was popularized by George Lucas in the original Star Wars film. Though it is simply an abridgment of "android", it has been used by Lucas and others to mean any robot, including distinctly non-human form machines like R2-D2. 

Another shortening, "andy", appears in Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (adapted to the screen as Blade Runner) and was a pejorative term for an android.

Newest in this line of terms is "gynoid" which actually is anything that resembles or pertains to the female human form. The term gynoid was first used by Isaac Asimov in a 1979 editorial, as a theoretical female equivalent of the word android.

But other terms have been used for feminine robots exist. The portmanteau "fembot" (feminine robot) was popularized by the television series The Bionic Woman in 1976 and used in the Austin Powers films and others to suggest a sexualized gynoid. 

An unfortunate, though not unexpected, progression in gynoids in fiction and now in actuality are that they are "eroticized." Sensitivity sensors in their breasts and genitals to facilitate sexual response comes from male desires for custom-made passive women and is compared to life-size sex dolls. 

The HBO series Westworld is a very updated version of the 1973 film, written and directed by Michael Crichton, about adult guests visiting an interactive amusement park containing lifelike androids. The androids and gynoids in the extended TV series are used for far greater violent and sexual pleasures than the original film. 

     

From Printing: ditto, mind your p's and q's, out of sorts

I am a big reader and I also love books and the bookmaking process. I came upon a book this past week called Printer’s Error: Irreverent Stories from Book History. The printing press and the democratization of knowledge through books changed the world.

One of the things in this book that I liked is how some common words and phrases come from the process of making books.

Here are a few I've found. I'm sure I'll add some more in the future.

I have used the word "ditto" and heard it used. Going back to schools 50 years ago, you might have recalled what we called a ditto machine that teachers used to make copies of handouts. In printing, ditto is shorthand to mean to repeat something that’s already been said. Its origin is the Italian word detto, the past participle of “to say.” 

The word came into wider usage with that early 20th-century duplicating machine which was produced by DITTO, Inc. And their simple logo was a single set of quotation marks " which is still used to mean "ditto" or same as above.

An 18th-century type case, with tools for typesetting

A phrase that I don't hear as much today as I did as a child is to "mind your p's and q's." When I was in seventh grade, I took a printing class and we actually learned to set type and use a printing press. (Yes, I must be old!)  This phrase when said by a teacher or parent meant to be on your best behavior or to pay close attention. But if my print shop teacher had said it in the printing context it would apply to setting type. In that process, you put each letter in backward, so that when the inked type is pressed into paper, the mirror image reads the right way forward. That meant that compositors had to be especially careful when it came to letters that look like mirror images of each other. In older type cases, each letter was kept in a segregated section to be picked out by the compositor setting the type. The lowercase p’s and q’s were nastily put right next to each other. If the placement had been different, maybe the phrases that would have emerged would have been “mind your b’s and d’s.” 

Related to those type cases, the capital letters were usually on the top rows and so were referred to as uppercase letters. 

Also from this typesetting area is the phrase "out of sorts." In common usage, it means to be feeling a bit off, perhaps unwell, or just grumpy. For printers and typesetting compositors it meant you were literally out of sorts. A sort is an individually cast piece of type. If you run out of out of type in the middle of a job, it would certainly make you feel out of sorts figuratively and literaaly.

Blue Cheer

Dickie Peterson, Randy Holden, and Paul Whaley in 1968

Blue Cheer was an American psychedelic blues-rock band that initially performed and recorded in the late 1960s and early 1970s in San Francisco. They were formed in 1966 by Dickie Peterson. He had been in a band, The Oxford Circle, with future Blue Cheer members Paul Whaley and Gary Lee Yoder. The band went through many personnel changes but eventually became a power-trio with bassist/singer Peterson, guitarist Leigh Stephens, and Whaley on drums.

They played in a psychedelic blues-rock style. They are also credited as being pioneers of heavy metal. Their cover of "Summertime Blues" is sometimes cited as the first in that genre. They are also considered by some to be early punk rockers, stoner rock, doom metal, experimental rock, and grunge. They were also widely considered to be the loudest band ever at the time when they emerged - loud to the point of pain for the audience. 

Their first hit was a cover version of Eddie Cochran's rockabilly "Summertime Blues" redone in a very hard rock version. It was on their debut album Vincebus Eruptum (1968). The single peaked at No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, their only such hit. The album peaked at No. 11 on the Billboard 200 chart. In Canada, the single peaked at No. 3 on the RPM Magazine chart. 

The band's name comes from the "Blue Cheer" which was a 1960's nickname for a high-quality LSD. The drug was promoted by "LSD chemist" and former Grateful Dead patron, Owsley Stanley. 

Coincidentally, Cheer is a laundry detergent sold in the United States and Canada that was introduced in 1950. It had distinctive blue granules, which formerly gave it the nickname "Blue Cheer" though it was marketed primarily as just Cheer and still is sold. 

first album 1968

Vincebus Eruptum
The History of Blue Cheer: Good Times are So Hard to Find
What Doesn't Kill You
The Beast Is Back: The Megaforce Years
Outsideinside
Live in Japan
Blue Cheer