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Comment by pkulak | Hacker News Reader

The 12th paragraph of the article:

"'Nu’ is too easily confounded with `new,’ and `Xi’ was not used because it is a common last name”, the WHO said, adding that the agency’s “best practices for naming disease suggest avoiding `causing offence to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic groups’".

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Xi/席/奚/习 doesn't even fall under the 200 most common surnames in Mainland China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_Chinese_surname...

Xie is number 23

Xie is not Xi which in turn is not the 'xi' consonant.

But it's significantly more common as a last name than any of the other greek letters. 席 is number 213. For context, Armstrong is the 213th most common surname in America. There are still many tens of thousands of people with that surname, it is clearly recognizable as common a surname, and you have definitely heard of at least one Armstrong.

> But it's significantly more common as a last name than any of the other greek letters.

Mu (https://forebears.io/surnames?q=mu) is more common than Xi (https://forebears.io/surnames?q=xi).

Why the "(sic)"? That's the normal spelling for British English.

Because it designates original spelling/usage in case anyone reading the quote is confused. No malice intended, typically.

Because I'm American and too dumb to realize that... I'll remove it.

So we don't want to offend folks with "Xi" as their last name, so we instead mock Lrrr, ruler of planet Omicron Persei 8!?

I mean technically, Omicron Persei 8 is a place name, so you're not wrong...

I'm really glad they skipped a "2 character" name irrespective of why they did it. Those would be murder to try to run through search engines.

"Omicron" and all manner of misspellings are going to be way easier to search for.

Even if their conclusion is OK, the reasoning "'Xi' was not used because it is a common last name" is based on a lie. 'Xi' is not a common last name. It happens to be the last name of the largest dictator on this planet, but it does not make it a common last name.

Sounds like the IOC and Apple's stance too. ;)

    :tw_flag:

Why didn’t they say “chi”?

What about the pi variant? That could be offensive to bakers.

they are less important than certain Xi, obviously

How dare we offend the sponsor...

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