X Appeal

 This is the August post;

The other day I noticed that a message was addressed to me as Mx. Decker. I assumed it was because the sender couldn’t decide whether I was a Miss or a Mrs. I thought that problem was solved with the use of Ms. Apparently it’s more complicated than that. With the increasing frequency of transgender and androgynous members in our society, it’s not just ones marital status that could be in question. It’s also ones sexual orientation. The use of the letter X has become a common way to circumvent all sorts of societal unknowns.

One of the more common uses that have been popular for ,a while now is LatinX. That’s the gender-neutral alternative to Latina or Latino. But I blame the explosion of the use of X today on Elon Musk for renaming Twitter X. It started with his SpaceX rockets. He even titled his artificial intelligence company xAI and created a special logo for it. Lord only knows what he’ll christen with X in the future.

To be fair, X has been around in many forms for a while now. The X Games, a semi-annual ESPN extreme sports competition, began in 1995 in Rhode Island as the Extreme Games. I don’t know when it was shortened to just X. The Xbox gaming console has been available in the U.S. since 2001.

I’m not sure what drives this X appeal, but it’s all around us. X has always symbolized something unknown and often mysterious. Simply thinking in terms of it having four points, we can group it with other similar symbols. The four-leaf clover is considered lucky, perhaps because it’s so rare (unlike X). When we find one, we usually preserve it in plastic and put it in our wallets.

Old fashioned Dutch-style windmills that were used to mill grain or pump water have four blades, though modern wind turbines usually have three. Railroad crossing signs are always an X. I still remember the scene in the movie Two For the Road with Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn. They’re hitchhiking and she gets a ride, leaving him behind. Farther up the road, she’s on foot again and has been hiding behind a railroad crossing sign; she’s so thin you can barely see her. When he gets within sight, she pops out, flapping her arms like the crossing sign. It was a great movie.

There are dozens of areas where X marks the spot. Take clothing sizes for instance. We have XL, 1X, 2X, 3X etc. in women’s. It gets even crazier for men, with XXL and XXXL. In mathematics, X is always the horizontal axis. In science, X-rays have countless uses, but Y-rays and Z-rays are virtually unheard of.

In popular culture, we had the X-Files science fiction TV series back in the nineties. Remember Scully and Mulder? There’s yet another remake of that in progress. We still have the X-Men team of mutant superheroes from Marvel Comics. Just the thought of Nightcrawler or Wolverine can send a frisson up ones spine! On the opposite end of the spectrum, in the Greek alphabet, X represents the letter chi. Many devoted Christians use chi to refer to Christ, especially when combined with the Greek rho to make the first letters of His name.

The uses for X keep proliferating. It’s prominent in company and brand names, like Xfinity, introduced in 2010, while that stalwart workhorse Xerox was founded 1906. Tesla has several models, but its Model X is the most popular. If you text a lot, you no doubt enjoy receiving XOXO kisses and hugs from your friends.

All this having been said, I still blame Elon Musk for the ubiquitousness of X in our lives today. Anywhere we go, there it is. With a name like Musk, you’d think he’d overwhelm us with sex appeal. But no, thanks to Elon and his rebranding of Twitter as X, we’re all drowning in X appeal.

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