X marks a lot of spots: Twitter’s new name has a very long history
In one of the most audacious — and widely mocked — rebrands in recent times, Twitter has become X. How this renaming will play out remains to be seen, but it’s yet another chapter in the story of a versatile letter that has most often referred to blanks, as in “X factors” and “X marks the spot.”
The earliest known examples in English of X having a meaning beyond the simple letter are from Old English, where it could refer to “X height” or “X length.” That meaning gained traction in the 1600s, when X started being used in math for a variable or unknown. Though other meanings have accrued to the letter (including serving as the Roman numeral for 10; kissing, as in “XO”; hard liquor; and abbreviations of “extreme” and “extra”), it’s that variable or blank meaning that tells most of the story of X.
In the 1940s, X picked up steam as a catchall label. “X factor” started popping up in military circles, meaning, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “the aspects of a serviceman’s life that have no civilian equivalent.” From there the term spread to more general use. When you X something out, you eliminate it, a usage around since at least 1942. The first known use of X in regard to pornographic movies, from a 1950 report of the British Parliament, suggests the term was coined to label the unspeakable: “We recommend that a new category of films be established (which might be called ‘X’) from which children under 16 should be entirely excluded.” X is capable of not only filling a blank but creating a bleep — or a XXXXing bleep.
Some weird-leaning pop culture phenomena have involved that same X — like the 1961 comic book “The X-Men,” which inspired many movies decades later, and the TV series “The X-Files.” In both cases, the X stands for something beyond the ken of the average person: mutants in the former, aliens in the latter. Human weirdos are represented by the letter too, like the groundbreaking LA punk band X.
So in a sense X might be a perfect name for Twitter, where so many folks like to make their mark and fill in the blank — if only the social media platform didn’t already have a name firmly entrenched in English. The wide awareness and use of “Twitter” and “tweet” make it likely that, in common usage at least, X will be X’d out.