Flint Dibble 🍖🏺 Profile picture
Archaeologist⛏️ Twitter threads📜 | he/him | Cardiff University | it's my real name | https://t.co/DkOgm59B3c | https://t.co/kAStjsIRIX

Nov 29, 2021, 6 tweets

Contrary to what all the epidemiologists are telling you, we actually know a lot about #Omicron

A short thread filled with Classical facts

Omicron is the 15th letter in the Greek alphabet

It literally means ὂ μικρόν or "small o" to distinguish it from the last letter in the Greek alphabet: Ω omega (the big O)

Remember that when making your O face

The ancient Greeks had a confusing number system. Letters were numbers. So alpha was one, beta was two, gamma was three, delta was four

Omicron was 70. What!

What's really cool is that the Greek letters that were numbers included letters that were no longer used

So, digamma (ϝ) was six and koppa (ϙ) was 90

So yeah, always remember that
ζ x ι = ο (get it?)

As one might expect there are lots of Greek words that used the letter omikron

Even the word "the" (at least in masculine nominative form) was
ὁ (pronounced "ho")

As @sentantiq pointed out, lots of negative words started with an omicron

Even the negative "not" started with an omicron "οὖ"

So, in reality, we don't not know a whole lot about #Omicron. We just need to ask Classicists to tell us more

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