A new strain of a deadly bug is on the loose. Scientists and public health officials are desperately trying to work out how dangerous it is – and how to stop it spreading.

Me? I am so petty I am still wondering how to say the damn word – or, rather, letter, the fifteenth of the Greek alphabet.

I thought I knew until this week. Now I am not so sure. And I am not alone.

This week, across the pond, The Daily Show, American TV satire at its best, produced a cheeky wee montage of newsreaders and public figures trying to pronounce the variant.

In block capitals, clip-makers attempted to capture the various spoken versions of the name. OMICRON. AHMEECRON. AHMEECON. AHMUHOMYCRON. OHMICRON, OHMYCRON. Then the Daily Show picked on poor Joe Biden, the president who came to office after overcoming a debilitating speech defect. He called the bug “THE OMNICRON”.

Sorry, these block capitals are probably not helping anybody. That is because we newspaper people are terrible at explaining pronunciation.

There is just no agreed way to spell words out phonetically using the standard English typography publications like The Herald use.

So I cannot type out how to say these various versions of Omicron using the phonetic alphabet.

Which is kind of the point of this entire column: unreformed standard English spelling is rubbish – truly, truly rubbish.

And this has consequences, potentially even democratic ones. Because some people can feel excluded – even, as in this case, from conversations about public health – because they do not know how to say terms being bandied around.

The problems many of us are having with saying Omicron illustrate this perfectly. Why? Well, the way we write this word – which most of us will only rarely have reason to say out loud – gives us few hints on its pronunciation.

I think most of us forget how stonkingly weird, random and eccentric English orthography can be.

Unless, that is, we find ourselves first explaining to a native-speaking child that there is a ‘b’ in debt and then to a foreign learner that this letter is not pronounced.

Our supposedly standard language is, at times, sub-standard. But it is also marvellously free-wheeling and un-policed.

Remember, English has 14 vowel sounds, give or take, but just six vowel letters. And, unlike several other European languages which use a Latin-based script, we do not use any squiggles or accents – diacritics – to tell them apart. Or identify where the stress lies in a word. Spanish, as an eg, plonks an accent above that first ‘o’ of omicron to let readers know how to say it. Not English, Instead, we have a bunch of opinions about what we think is right – and what is wrong.

Such disputes especially apply to the the BBC. In the absence of the kind of linguistic academy, Aunty has become a sort or unofficial arbiter of correct British usage. Omicron? Now that is originally Greek, ancient Greek, in fact. It basically means Little “o’, as opposed to Big ‘O”, Omega.

So classicists got in on the act. “I am NOT a technical ancient linguist,” tweeted Oxford historian – and national treasure –Mary Beard. “But I do find it a bit odd that the BBC News is saying omicron with the stress on the first syllable.”

Modern Greeks have a different take. The Telegraph turned to another Oxford classicist, Armand D’Angour, for advice.

“In ancient Greek they would have said oh-mee-kron,” he told the paper. “In English, that became a long i, so that is why we see microscope and micron, and oh-my-kron. But in modern Greek they have dropped that long or central i or ee, so it makes sense to say oh-me-cron, as the modern Greeks do.”

Indeed, social media is populated with Greeks living in anglophone nations raging about that middle vowel.

Well, sorry, Greeks, ancient and modern: how you pronounce omicron is great fun but irrelevant. Probably half the words in this column have ‘foreign roots” – whatever that nonsense is supposed to mean – and we do not base their pronunciation on their etymology.

As a third Oxford professor, Andreas Willi, this time speaking in the New York Times, said: “When we speak of ‘Paris’ in English, that is also very different from the ‘proper’ French way of pronouncing the same name. But it is hardly wrong in a strict sense.”

Dictionaries – the fat ones with phonetic spellings – list various pronunciations for ‘omicron’.

Here is the big picture: there is no right, and there is no wrong. This is a "you say tomato, I say tomato” situation. It’s scone versus scone, garage versus garage, envelope versus envelope. The best way to deal with how to say ‘omicron” is – as the Daily Show did – to make a joke out of it. We can all do with a bit of a laugh in this difficult times, even about the name of a fatal bug variety.

No politician is ever going to have the guts to reform English spelling. Which is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. But at some point we need to have a think about whether there is a danger this leaves us with an unjustified linguistic hierarchy, sometimes a class one, with people who insist they know better than others how to say things. They do not. If there is no right or wrong, then there is no better or worse. Your ‘omicron’ is as good as mine, and mine as yours. The disease, after all, does not discriminate.

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.