This tweet did remind me something. I read the linguists are concerned. Now isn’t that interesting? “Omicron: The most mispronounced word of the year”, that’s the article by Sashi Tharoor featured in the Khaleej Times of sixteenth December. If what he says is right and it ought to be, a body called the ‘US Captioning Company’ has entered it in the ‘Most Mispronounced Words’ of the year! Oh me God. I stand educated: Joe Biden calls it ‘Omnicron’. A legislator from the Indian pantheon of Ministers calls it ‘Omicorn’, probably because he has the habit of saying ‘Oh my God’ often and yes of course must be concerned of the corn production in the country! He has reason to be though. Tharoor had been more down to earth. He went after those irritating corn you get under your feet. But that’s aside. He writes so lucidly about “OM-mee-cron”, ‘oh-my-cron’, “oh-MY-cron”, “OH-mi-cron”, “ó-mee-kro”: there seems to be no end to the variations, all thrust upon us by the good intentions of World Health Organisation, he says.
“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, Shakespeare famously opined. Whether you say “O me” or “O my”, Omicron is infecting people worldwide. Does it matter all that much how you actually pronounce it?” That’s how he concludes the article. Now where did I smell this rose recently? That was in my book, “When Waves Fell Silent”. In this memoir of another unknown Indian. I wrote,
“Critically speaking, wasn’t Shakespeare right in making Juliet Capulet say, ‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet’. The virus was not going to be less threatening irrespective of what you call it. But then, we do not want something to sound too twisting to the tongue. It’s so common that the west ends up with a fractured tongue trying to pronounce the Asian names, which they seem obsessed to pronounce correctly. And the Asians, who don’t hold on to such scruples, craggily use all kinds of pronunciations when it comes to their European counterparts. But COVID looked fine. Down the line, we the broadcasters, who have to invariably sound the word in all its originality, would have been at an impasse trying to maintain uniformity in delivery, had it been otherwise. And it looked we were going to see and talk more of it in the coming days.”
Chapter 50, They Who Belong, When Waves Fell Silent.
Thank my stars, for am now no longer obliged to go on air with the word! I now understand there are five variants by WHO – alpha, beta, gamma, delta and omicron. But I got the fright of my life when Tharoorji mentioned of two more – lambda and mu (μ) – for that last one, I had chosen as my pseudonym. It was a benign attempt to abbreviate my own name: Menon Unnikrishnan. All good intentions…
