When the World Health Organization announced in May 2021 that it would start using letters of the Greek alphabet to designate Covid-19 variants of interest and concern, it hoped that the new labeling system would be " simple, easy to say, and remember ." Over a year later, WHO's Covid-19 naming has a lot of people asking: "what?" The designation of omicron variants as BA.4 and BA.5, which is now dominant (and deadly) has confused many people and hindered health officials in "selling" the idea that the public needs to remain vigilant. "It should have been a lot simpler, and a lot plainer," says Laurel Sutton, linguist and co-founder of Catchword , the 24-year-old San Francisco-based naming agency behind company names such as Asana and Upwork. Greek letters, she points out, don't mirror the phonetic order of the Latin alphabet--"gamma," for instance, comes before "delta." Many Greek letters already have established meanings: lambda is associated with the LGBTQIA community, … [Read more...] about The Omicron Follies: Covid-19 Variant Names Offer a Lesson in Bad Branding