Now to the Lord sing praises all you within this place
And if 'this place' is No. 10 each other now embrace...
A cheap shot, I know, but really though; what a shower. Boris could take lessons in leadership from Fred Karno.
I'm going to address omicron. But before you tune out with forebodings of more bad news let me assure you that mine will be not a virological point of view; rather a linguistic one. The word has been mangled in all sorts of ways: I've heard omicrom, omnicron...
<parenthesis>
I've heard this latter at least twice on Newscast. The first time. the speaker was a Brit award-winner, and I raised a supercilious eyebrow...<etymological_note>...But the second was Dr Angelique Coetzee, discoverer of Omicron ...
(Incidentally, that's what supercilious means.)
</etymological_note><meta_parenthesis>(originally dubbed nu [ν] – in fact the 26 November edition of Newscast was the called The 'nu' variant. But then someone realized that calling the old variant nu, after sigma is discovered [at some point in 2022, before they run out of Greek letters and have to adopt the Only Connect method of using Egyptian hieroglyphs – I wonder who'll be first to catch the "Eye of Horus variant"...], might be confusing; they've also decided that xi [ξ] would be bad for relations with President Xi.</meta_parenthesis>and darling of many a Tory ostrich. The slip occurs at 26'25" in this episode. But I digress...</parenthesis>
<autobiographical_note>....But a knowledge of etymology, as so often (except in Mr Towey's case...
(and my Greek master had a talent for metathesis [see here for more about this sort of phoneme-swapping], so that he called this little o omricon; another of his more common slips was referring to Mesopotamia as 'between the Tigris and the Euphatres')
</autobiographical_note>
<orthographical_note>
Another example is ancillary vs auxiliary. People who don't know the background aren't sure how many ls and how many is there are.But an ancilla was a maidservant; (maybe there was a masculine, but ancilla is the only version I've met, inscribed on a ring unearthed (unashed) at Pompeii, and discussed here:
Ring found at Pompeii;
it is to be hoped that the wife of the dominus didn't find out.
<parenthesis>
(I was going to copy&paste the picture from that old post, but it's too heavily annotated there. Don't let me stop you from doing some background reading though; I think it's rather fun.)
</parenthesis>
| And auxilium is help. So, armed with this information, you need never write anciliary again. |
</orthographical_note>
...) should prevent this. Ancient Greek had two sorts of o: o-mega and o-micron – 'big o' and 'little o': simples.
The little o, like any other god-fearing o, was tucked in between n and p (ν and π); (strictly speaking, ξ was there too; but let's not cause a diplomatic incident). But big o, o-mega, was in pride of place, right at the end of the alphabet.
<silliness_warning>I suppose the beginning would have been even more prestigious; but then it would be the omegabet
.</silliness_warning>
And 'the Alpha and Omega' is the bee's knees. In this early Christian word square... 
... the words tell the confused, arbitrary and multilingual story of sower. But the words weren't chosen at random. As this account says
The square reads the same up or down as well as forward or backward. However, the words do not collectively seem to mean anything. Individually, sator means "the sower", tenet "holdeth", opera "the works", rotas "the wheels [accusative case]". Arepo is not a Latin word; it is perhaps related to a Celtic root meaning "plough", an interpretation known in XIV Century Byzantium
...(though how a medieval Byzantine word found it's way to 1st century Rome beats me: a miracle , perhaps.)
The same account observes that the letters in the square can be organized like this
A P OA
T
E
R
P A T E R N O S T E R
O
S
T
E
O R A
with the left-overs put in the corners. (as I said before in a post whose graphics have gone the way of much seven-year old html)
(My use of the term left-overs shouldn't be read as implying anything dismissive: 'I am the Alpha and Omega' has biblical resonance. Those letters even find their way into the Christmas Carol Unto Us is Born a Son:'O and A and A and O'
Cum cantibus in coro...And during the preparations for Easter Midnight Mass [in the Roman Catholic rite, of course{!}] the celebrant prepares the Paschal Candle with chips of incense [I think – I never got that close] inserted into the wax in the form of those two letters [repeated in the 'quadrants' defined by a crucifix]. Those two letters, repeated round about a crucifix, are by no means random 'left-overs'.)
Duty calls.
b
