10/27/2022 0 Comments X mark text symbol![]() Less is known about how “o” came to signify a hug.Īn oft-quoted and unconfirmed “o” theory was postulated by the late Leo Rosten in his 1968 “Joys of Yiddish.” Rosten suggested that the “o” may have evolved also as a signature. “Just look at ‘The Song of Songs.’ The same song could be one person’s devotional hymn and another’s love poem.” “Mystics went back and forth on the love of God and love of a beloved spouse going way back,” he says. Goranson adds that blessings and kisses have been intertwined for all of history. In his research, Goranson found several citations from 1880 on, such as a poem published in 1893: “Why do our sweet sentimental young misses / In love letters make little crosses for kisses?” ![]() “Please excuse bad writing as I am in an awful hurry. Goranson prefers a later OED citation, an 1894 letter by Winston Churchill to his mama. Their juxtaposition with “Ave Maria” is similar to Daniel Defoe’s use of x in “Robinson Crusoe,” which was published in 1719 and refers to crosses as blessings. “The x’s in White’s letter could possibly mean kisses, but it is more likely they meant blessings,” he says. Stephen Goranson, a researcher at Duke University, disagrees with the OED. The Oxford English Dictionary attributes the first recorded use of x as a kiss to British curate and naturalist Gilbert White in a 1763 letter which ended, “I am with many a xxxxxxx and many a Pater noster and Ave Maria, Gil White.” It said to family and society: ‘You can’t tell me who I should marry.’ ” “Romantic love becomes an obsession, and the kiss became empowering. He speculates that “x” underwent a conversion in an act of medieval romantic rebellion. ![]() “Symbols have a way of jumping from one domain to another,” says Danesi, who wrote “ The History of a Kiss: The Birth of Popular Culture.” And it’s a small step to come from sealing a letter to sealing a love affair. At the same time, letters and books, as well as oaths of political and economic fealty between kings and their vassals, were “sealed with a kiss” - an early antecedent of the acronym SWAK, which became popular during World War I for soldiers to imprint on their letters home. The x became the signature of choice in the Middle Ages, a time when few people could write, and documents were sealed with an x embossed in wax or lead. “We still see it on churches from medieval times.” “X meant Christ, and because of that, it meant faith and fidelity,” says Marcel Danesi, a professor of linguistic anthropology and semiotics at the University of Toronto. When Christianity came along, x came to represent a cross. ![]() The symbol x is the letter taw in early Hebrew (and in Ezekiel, a mark set “upon the foreheads” of men) and chi in Greek. There is no definitive answer to how a cross came to mean a kiss, but it’s most likely to have evolved from the written tradition. Then there are auditory explanations, such as the similarity in the pronunciation of “x” and “kiss.” There are visual explanations: that “x” resembles a kiss, for example that “o” looks like an embrace or the union of bodies and that “x” and “o” together form a kiss on a face. The Internet abounds with origin theories. Where do those symbols come from, these ur-emoticons that we sprinkle so liberally across our correspondence? X MARK TEXT SYMBOL CODEThe art of writing longhand may have faded, but many of us continue to emit x’s and o’s like a binary love code in the e-mails that consume our daily lives. After my signature, she told me, I was to add the symbols “x” and “o.” A kiss and a hug. In the early 1960s, my mother instructed me in letter-writing etiquette. ![]()
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