It seems likely at this point that the coronavirus variants of significance will outnumber the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet. Then what? The Comma Queen, Mary Norris, weighs in.
During hurricane season, if meteorologists use up the approved letters of the English alphabet, they have traditionally turned to Greek for naming storms. In recent years, we got as far as Hurricane Iota. During the pandemic, scientists with the World Health Organization are relying on Greek to make the variants of the coronavirus easier to talk about and to avoid associations with the names of places where the variants were initially detected; for instance, the strain with the designation B.1.
If this seems to be happening too fast, it’s partly because scientists have skipped some letters. They got to mu , which is right in the middle, and then left out nu , because it sounds confusingly like “new”; we can’t go around talking about a new Nu variant of interest. They also skipped the next letter, xi , not because it looks so exotic, sitting there between “N” and “O,” but because Xi is a Chinese surname and, one cannot help but notice, the surname of the guy who runs China.
A guest on the radio quiz show “Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!” recently opined that Americans do not take Greek seriously—it just sounds “goofy.” He may have a point: Greek is the language of math and science, but it has also been employed in science fiction. After omicron comes pi , the one Greek letter that people remember from high-school geometry. The Pi variant sounds like an alternative dessert in the cafeteria.
Just as the English alphabet groups the three crazy letters—“X,” “Y,” and “Z”—at the end, Greek saves some very special characters for last. Upsilon is followed by three letters whose order nobody can keep straight: phi , chi , and psi —or is it chi, psi, and phi? Fie on the Phi variant. Chi could be trouble. It is, after all, the first letter in “Christ,” and zealots may interpret a Chi variant as the Second Coming.
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