![]() ![]() 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? The 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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