‘Omicron’ by Any Other Name – Opinion

Omigosh, now we have… Omicron, everybody!

Bonchie wrote yesterday that the World Health Organization made an announcement about the new and most dangerous COVID-19 variant.

Then earlier on Sunday, my colleague Nick Arama’s piece revealed some very suspect ‘fact-checking’ by the Associated Press on why the new variant will be called ‘Omicron’ — not ‘Nu’ and Absolutely not ‘Xi.’ Because, just possibly, the WHO is loathe to rile up certain dictators from countries that may or may not have caused the Wuhan coronavirus to spread across the globe.

She wrote the following:

According to the AP, this is the first time that the WHO has skipped letters when naming the variants. So, apparently, the only folks they don’t want to offend are those named Xi. They also don’t care about offending the Zeta cartels.

They could call it “Xi virus”, which would be the best name. But the WHO is so submissive to China, they couldn’t bring themselves to do it.

So what can we learn from this? With a simple comparison that even children can comprehend, I believe I have a better answer than my colleagues.

How does the National Weather Service identify storms in every single season of a hurricane? You’ll be surprised to know that they use Names. People’s names. The most devastating storm of recent memory was this? In 2017, Hurricane Maria was a Category Five hurricane that caused widespread destruction. CNN even said it. Does Maria have a common name?

It is, you bet. Many people are aware that Maria, the Spanish name for Mary or Miriam is Jesus Christ’s mother. No surprise, then, that it’s an extremely popular name, especially in majority-Roman Catholic countries. This includes the Caribbean where hurricanes caused a historical death and destruction.

According to the Social Security Administration (SSA), “Mary” is the most popular given name for female babies for the past 100 years (from 1921 to 2021), based on Social Security card application data as of March 2021. That’s 3,196,385 people, just in the Unites States. And “Maria”? It was also the 50th most-loved name over that span. But we wouldn’t want to forget the Maries (down at the 92nd ranking out of 100 names)! They have had 361,371!

The statistics website for Sweden has a handy search tool which allows you to find the popularity of any surname or given name in Scandinavia. Where does Mary and Maria do? Per the tool, there are 10, 028 women have the name “Mary” as part of their given name, and another 82,731 are simply called “Maria.” But a whopping number — 444,524 — have Maria as some part of their first name.

But we never heard a peep of complaint from the WHO or anyone else about the offensiveness — to millions of women — by using “Mary” to describe this killer storm. At minimum, you’re disparaging a slew of people as violent. Then obviously, there’s the whole misogyny angle. Is that what you think?

Coincidentally, “Mary” plays a part of one of my top musical numbers of all time, from George M. Cohan, one of the great American Broadway composers. You might have heard that we lost Stephen Sondheim. We honored him over the weekend.

Here’s Cohan’s great song, in its movie incarnation (“Yankee Doodle Dandy”), with James Cagney and Joan Leslie playing Cohan and his wife — Mary. Enjoy!