“The kiss became, ‘If I kiss that man, then this is the man I love and want,’” says Danesi. It said to family and society: ‘You can’t tell me whom I should marry.’” This may have been particularly true for women, who had less say than men over the choice of a lover. “Romantic love becomes an obsession, and the kiss became empowering. “Symbols have a way of jumping from one domain to another,” says Danesi, who wrote The History of the Kiss: The Birth of Popular Culture, “and it’s a small step to come from sealing a letter to sealing a love affair.” He speculates that “x” underwent a conversion in an act of medieval romantic rebellion. (My mother also taught me to write SWAK across the flaps of envelopes before mailing letters.) During that period, it was customary to close books with a kiss, and 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.
From there it 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. Once it was a sacred symbol, the “x” came to mean “faith and fidelity,” says Marcel Danesi, a professor of linguistic anthropology and semiotics at the University of Toronto. “So both orientations of crossed lines-X shape and the more-or-less lower case T shape-took on religious significance among Christians.” No one knows exactly how this happened: One story is that in 312 CE the Roman Emperor Constantine saw the chi-rho in a dream in which God told him “in this sign you will conquer.” Constantine went on to legalize Christianity, which later became the official religion of Rome. When Christianity came along, it co-opted the “x.” “In Christian texts, one abbreviation of the Greek word Christos-meaning messiah-used the first two Greek letters of Christos, chi (X) and rho (P), combined into one shape,” says Stephen Goranson, a historian of religion at Duke University who studies the etymology of symbols and words. A simple, easily drawn shape, it entered the Western alphabet as the ancient Phoenician letter samekh for the consonant sound “s.” In early Hebrew it was the letter taw and makes an appearance in the Book of Ezekiel as a mark set “upon the foreheads” to distinguish the good men of Jerusalem from the bad. Then there were auditoryĪssociations such as the similarity in the pronunciation of “x” and “kiss.” But it very quickly became apparent that x most likely evolved from the written tradition. I found visual explanations: that “x” resembles a kiss “o” looks like an embrace and together “x” and “o” form a kiss on a face.
The Internet abounds with origin theories of all kinds. Suddenly I became curious about where these symbols come from, these ur-emoticons that English speakers of all faiths sprinkle so liberally across our correspondence.
X AND O GAMES CODE
I never thought about it myself until she passed away in 2012 and I began to emit streams of “x’s” and “o’s” like a binary love code in the countless personal and professional emails that consume much of my daily life. So deeply embedded was this English-language tradition that I am sure it never crossed her mind-she was a proper Jewish mom as well as the executive director of the Jewish Community Center-that the “x” might have anything to do with a cross. Yet at the same time, my mother taught me to write “x” and “o”-a kiss and a hug-after my signature. My father transformed the expression “cross your fingers” into “star your fingers” because, as he used to explain, crosses are Christian and thus not for Jews. I grew up in a family wary of anything overtly Christian.
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