WORDSPEAK
`X' as in Xmas
ANAND
AS promised in the last month's "Wordspeak", this column is about why the X in Xmas is thought to represent the Christian cross. And about some questions that astute readers raised.
This month Christians the world over celebrate what was originally known as Cristes mæsse in Old English, and in northern England also as Kesmas, Cursmas, and Cursmis, meaning simply the mass, or festival, of Christ. It is supposed to commemorate the birth of Christ but, as his actual birthday is unknown, one sect of Christians, at the Council of Nicea (320-323 A.D.) assigned it to this date as a compromise with another, the cult of Mithras.
At the same time, Christmas will be written and printed a billion times as what some people call an eye-sore of an abbreviation: Xmas. This neologism was first recorded in 155. But, then, the X in Xmas is a very old abbreviation for Christ. An X-like character in the Greek alphabet is called chi (pronounced kee). Theologians have used chi as an abbreviation for Christ (Khristos in Greek). Christianity was recorded written as "Xianity" as early as 1100.
The other explanation is that in the Middle Ages few could read or write, and some of these people would make "their mark" (thence the origin of the phrase) making an elaborate mark or stylised scrawl as their signature. Those not able to do so simply drew a cross, the symbol of Christ, on the paper and then kissed it. Kissing the X represented an oath to fulfil obligations specified in the document, and the X and the kiss eventually became synonymous. This X symbol was known as the Christ-cross, which later turned to "crisscross" and X also found its way into Xmas. That is why Xs sometimes (esp. at the end of a letter) signify kisses.
Several readers wanted to know why the initial "X" at the beginning of words such as Xerox is pronounced as "Z". It seems it becomes "Z" only in words of Greek origin; in other Indo-European languages it remains as "ks" and in Chinese it is "sh" or "she". Some Greek speakers pronounce "sh" as "s". I once had a Greek-born colleague, a professor of television, who (like speakers of several north Indian languages) said "shade" as "sade" and "ship" as "sip", causing both confusion and laughter among Canadian students. It obviously goes back a long way: Xian or Shian, an industrial city in central China and the ancient capital of the country, was called Sian by the ancient Greeks, and is the source for the synonym for China in Sino-Indian or Sino-American.
English has very few words where the first initial X is pronounced as "ks", and one of them, arguably, is the most common: X-ray. Xerox, the second most common, is of Greek origin. Chester Carlson, the American inventor of the Xerox machine in 1938 that used electrophotography, a method of dry photocopying, borrowed the name from "xero", Greek for dry, and "graphy" meaning "drawn" or "written". Since the image is transferred by using the attractive forces of electric charges (static), it is sometimes also called an electrostat. Among other x-words are xenophobia (xeno: foreign or strange, and phobia: fear), and xylophone, composed of the Greek xylo (wood) which refers to the flat wooden bars of the musical instrument.
Among proper names, Xavier (as in St. Francis Xavier) and Xanthippe come to mind. The latter was Socrates' wife and her name has become synonymous with a quarrelsome, nagging, shrewish woman. In "The Taming of Shrew" Shakespeare wrote: "Be she as foul as was Florentius' love,/ As old as Sybil, and a curst and shrewd/As Socrates' Xanthippe, or a worse, /She moves me not." But, by all accounts, Socrates was a difficult husband and no saint either (not to say ugly and uncouth in appearance), and his ill-tempered wife might have been maligned to show him in good light.
The great Mongolian emperor Kublai Khan maintained a summer residence north of the Great Wall of China at Shangdu (modern spelling Shang-tu). "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree," these opening lines of Coleridge's perhaps opium-induced reverie brought the word Xanadu into the English language. Marco Polo's travels to the East and his lofty accounts of Kublai Khan's kingdom forever marked Xanadu as a place of exotic luxury and magnificence.
And if you confuse Xenophanes with Xenophon, as I did, a Greek scholar will tell you that the former was a 5th Century B.C. Greek philosopher who criticised the belief that the gods resembled human beings. And the latter, a Greek historian and writer, and a disciple of Socrates, existed nearly a century later.
E-mail the writer at: anand@journalist.com
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