![]() ![]() 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 and o cheetos 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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