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Very interesting letter of the week response today.  I think calling Phyrexia a metaphor for anything in reality is stretching things a bit, but the general philosophy Doug expresses here is exactly why Ravnica is my favorite MTG world (and the one I tapped as being most deserving of a return in my GDS letter response, though that was more about the sheer untapped potential of a world defined by overpopulation and the diversity of ten guilds plus several smaller mystical organizations).  Phyrexia is a black-hat entity, very well-done but not precisely realistic; Ravnica, however, shows exactly what happens when the march of progress becomes more important than preserving human lives or ecological systems.  Murder has been legalized by the guilds, partly because a lot of them are red or black, but mostly because Ravnica is full, and in desperate need of population control.  That's a hop-skip-and-jump away from where the Chinese already are and where America soon will be if it continues to grow as it is doing.

PS - I'm extremely happy that Magic has gotten its first Dais and Censer in this set.  More versimilitude via the utilization of magical tools resembling those in real-world occultist traditions, kthxbye.

With a BA in Classics, and going to grad school for Hellenistic Archaeology, i am alright with this

Very pleased to discover "Myr" was derived from "myrmidon". After hearing a few people pronounce it ME-ER (which may be correct, but I always read it as MY-ER) I was worried it might be a sly reference to the word "mere". Because, you know, they're all little guys!

Interesting to hear the origin of some of the words in Scars of Mirrodin.  So is Myr pronounced Mur, Meer, or what?

I don't know about Certarch, and Fulgent but I know a little about the other words.

I have seen the word Dais in places other than MTG.  I am not entirely sure what it is but I know it is a real word.

Oxidda may not be a real word, but seems to be based off oxidation.  Which is the chemical process of turning iron into rust when in contact with oxygen.  There is also an entire category of reactions in chemistry called oxidation-reduction.

Argent seems to be a shortened form of Argentum.  Argentum is both the Latin word for silver (hence silver being labeled Ag on the periodic table), and was the original name for Mirrodin.