OMNIcron??? A Linguist explains

With the new variant, ever wonder why some people say "OMNIcron" instead of "omicron"? Well, some people did, and they asked me about it enough that I made a video.

[holyfool]

This reminds me as a vocal analogue to the misspelling of “minuscule” as “miniscule”. There are just so many English words with “mini” in them that folks default to it.

[ErklaerMirDieWelt]

Toodaloo is à toute à l'heure?! Ayayayayay. I legit thought it was some sort of children's word. English and French are both foreign languages to me and the way they butcher each other sometimes has me shook :D

[Howtheheckarehandleswit]

The thing that frustrates me about this particular change (and this may be related to me being autistic) is that because "omni" is a valid English prefix, whenever someone says "omnicron" instead of "omicron", I involuntarily spend a few seconds focused on figuring out what a "cron" is so that I can reconstruct what being/having/relating to all of them might mean, and thus end up missing whatever is said immediately afterwards

[timor]

5:00 I'll never forget day 1 in the USA when I was young and this guy at the hostel I was staying at asked if we could try going to a somewhat exclusive bar together because "they'll probably let us in because you have an accent". And at that moment, I realised no-one around me had an American accent. They were just normal.

[davidhumphreys]

I always got a huge kick out of English learners reactions when they make the connection between the English name of the letter "W" and "double U". Today I experienced it myself with "O-mega" and "O-micron". Thank you thank you thank you for that. Liked & Subscribed!

[kaitlyn__L]

Oh, “toodles!” is an old totes adorbs abbrevo AND an altered loan phrase? Amazing.

[sazji]

I speak Greek so obviously I wouldn’t turn omicron into an all-crone. :-) But I also do nativize it; I say “ōmikron” rather than “ōmikrōn”. (Yes, there are better IPA symbols to render that but I don’t have them on my iPhone!)

[DaMoosicRawks]

It's 2023 and I was today years old when I learned that that old ass variant of COVID was called omicron!

[vincentheartland]

1:20 - 1:40 - Yes, this is the problem, and their failure to have such an academic curiousity as to be encountering these words and appreciating their subtle nuances makes them objectively worse people than me!

[serjbrattich]

Another thought that I had strengthening the phonological neighborhood argument is where the foot boundary falls; namely (omi)F (cron)F. Visible with my judgment of omi-f'ing-cron being acceptable while o-f'ing-micron is not. Funnily enough, this flies in the face of etymology. Since we find ourselves with the rare foot (omi)F the tendency to associate it to (omni)F is quite high as you say in the video. :)

[hornblat]

My husband’s first car was a Dodge Omni. I’m now thinking that has led to my pronunciation of it..

[uchuuseijin]

au-ME-crohn is how David Bowie pronounced it in the video game "Omikron: The Nomad Soul", so that's how I say it

[bjoernaltmann]

And then there is Omnicom, some ad agency conglomerate

[jimwinger]

I was disappointed when people started using "omnicron" because I had to change a bunch of passwords!
I'd use it sort of jokingly as "Big-Oh" is used in a technical sense (computer science, etc) to denote a form of complexity/difficulty
of a task. So omNi- became a cute amplifier to say something was VERY complex.
Even further, the thing being described is known as "time complexity" -- so there was a further blending into omNicHron as a fun way of implying "infinite time" or, an intractable problem (in the technical sense : an example is strong encryption where the solution is clear, but intractable as it would take an impractical, 'greater than the number of atoms in the universe', amount of time to solve)

[krikeles]

If one is aware of the unit of measure called the micron ( μ which is 1x10 to the -6 meters) and is sort of pronounced My Krawn. The one might pronounce omicron as Oh!My Krawn!. OMG. Given that the omicron variant is surging now, maybe that is a reasonable pronunciation

[samueldickey]

Oh-muh-krahn. I've learned a very little bit of Greek. Canadian English.

[fariesz]

i know the covid variant will probably come up as much linguistically anymore, but as for the letter.. i think i shall pronounce it _ə-MEE-krən_ just to mess with both English _and_ Greek speakers

[SideWalkAstronomyNetherlands]

o mikron = small oo, what is so hard? OOO - mega, big oo.

[louisnorred]

But actually I think descriptivism has gotten a little too much ground recently, and whenver people talk about Prescriptivism and Descriptivism, at least among content aimed at hoi polloi, they're talking about how Prescriptivism is wrong and Descriptivism is right (sort of ironically I guess), whereas my sense of academia's reception is that there's a place for each of the philosophies of language when applied correctly. Having said that, I think you make good points in this video about linguistic neighborhoods and english speakers mistaking one greek phoneme for one more popularly used in english

[notwithouttext]

i say omicron with a short o, because that's why it's omicron and omega in the first place