X factor: The difficult 24th letter

BN Goswamy

With its long, ambiguous history and multiple phonemes, the letter X is quite a dark horse. It can mean Christ, like the X in Xmas, stand for a chromosome, and even show up in friendly and amorous correspondence (XOXO). But, how did X end up in the alphabet to begin with?

“X” may take up less space in the dictionary than any of its 23 compatriots but, in terms of its diverse uses, it’s a letter that defines, well, overcompensation. For it seems, waywardly, to want to sprawl out in every direction imaginable. As such, it rigorously resists all attempts to restrain it.

— From diverse sources

When seeing things as they were in the 19th century, or reading about them, I can wholly understand, and sympathise with, the publishers of alphabets. To find an illustration for the letter X — 24th in the English alphabet — must have been a beast of a task. Not unlike finding a word beginning with the ‘nasal’ letter ‘n’ in Devanagari — last in the retroflex line and often described as an anunasika — and ending with the name ‘Ravana’, explaining apologetically all the time that the letter occurs somewhere inside the word but does not occupy pride of place at the very beginning. It is fun, as we see it at this distance, illustrators struggling with X. Many of them, after digging deep, came up with the name Xerxes — fourth King of the Achaemenid Empire, who ruled in the 5th century before Christ, conqueror of Greece and builder of great structures at Susa and Persepolis. What he must have looked like most illustrators did not know. So, we have a range of figures parading under the name in books of alphabets: now young and clean-shaven like Alexander, now an old version of Osama bin Laden. Some illustrators or publishers landed with the name Xantippe, wife of the great philosopher Socrates — strong associations with Greece again — about whom many anecdotes, some rather foul-smelling, are narrated. She is remembered as a nagging, scolding and shrewish wife. Once, it is narrated, she was so enraged with her husband that she took a chamber pot and poured it out over her husband’s head. But the philosopher is believed to have taken this philosophically and simply stated: “After thunder comes rain!” There is also then the arguable but widely cited quote from Socrates — “By all means, marry. If you will get for yourself a good wife, you will be happy forever after; and if by chance you will get a common scold like my Xanthippe: why, then, you will become a philosopher.” So, the letter X in many alphabet books leans on Xantippe, even though how parents and teachers, teaching the alphabet to young ones, might have coped with explaining who Xantippe was and what is she known for, remains a question. Finally, scraping the bottom of the barrel, some illustrators produced Xanthus, reputedly the name of the steed that Hector rode in the Trojan War. But very rarely. One can sense some worry regarding X spreading to the letters around it, for many books resorted to giving up on the whole last section of the alphabet. What about Xylophone, then, one might ask? The simple musical instrument by this name was not widely known in the 19th century, one learns. And never appeared in alphabet books of those times. But celebrated illustrators and cartoonists did anyway have fun with the letter, like Cruikshank in his ‘Comic Alphabet’ (1847), for instance, or Edward Lear in his whimsical ‘Nonsense Books’ (1888).

But in our times things have changed, and the letter is having a field day. Now it is everywhere: employed in a whole range of fields: from algebra, to genetics, to aerospace, to sex and spirituality. The abundant meanings that the letter carries now have almost everything to do with the context that engages it. And there is a plethora of possibilities. Names and terms roll off tongues easily: X-ray, the diagnostic aid; Xerox, the giant corporation; X-men, if we are to believe screenplay writers, who were mutants; Xenophobia that one knows from international conflicts and battles; ‘X-Files’, the iconic sci-fi film series; X-factor, which the ‘public’ credits celebrities with being possessed of. Then, of course, there are all those lurid signs blazing XXX inviting you to view erotic films, if you have not already used the letter to identify female chromosomes. Christmas is no longer Christmas, but X’mas, and in clothing X means ‘extra’ as you would know if you went shopping after having gotten off the weighing scale at home. In general, X stands also for an unknown or unnamed factor, thing, or person, else, why would the fiery Black civil rights activist, born Malcolm Little in a Baptist minister’s family, drop his ‘slave name’, Little, and change to Malcolm X? There is, at the same time, good taste in X, as it is a name given to an ale of quality and therefore marked on the outside of a brewer’s cask. It can contain ambiguities, for in Jewish-Kabbalistic philosophy, X stands both for life and death. As a Roman numeral, it denotes 10; in mathematics it stands for multiplication, and in algebra — if we are careful and use it in lower case — it is the first of the unknown quantities or variables.

I — even I, while writing all this — can see that this is getting to be confusing: far too much to absorb, in fact. It might not, therefore, be a poor idea if one were to recede into the past and go back to the comfort of the 1865 ‘Alphabet of Animals’ by a Lady who wrote:

X

X is not a letter

Beginning a word

For any one animal —

Fish, beast, or bird.

But there was one creature

With two legs like you,

That the Greeks called a Xany;

Now mind what you do —

Or they will call you a Xany

If you go to a school,

And don’t mind your lesson —

For Xany means fool!

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