Oct 31 2022 - X Marks the Spot

 

X - is any real number.  In fact, x is a lot of things.  Then why does x mark the spot? The common answer is that it was first recorded in 1813.   As the location on a map for hidden treasure.   Another repeated usage is that it was supposedly  put into common usage by the British army, who performed executions by marking a piece of paper with a black x and positioning it on the heart of someone sentenced to death.  This seems strange to me, more of a form of torture.  I would think the British army knew how to shoot accurately. Another reference is that at the height of Chicago gangsterism in the 1920s that the specific phrase x marks the spot took on specific meaning.  When newspapers started to abstain from publishing pictures of actual corpses in the scenes of murders, the x was used on the bodiless photos to indicate where it had been positioned. As a result, spotted came to mean ‘murdered’, in the slang of that time, and to be put on the spot took on a specific implication. These seem more like urban myths.  These seem so unsatisfying for a letter that has many applications.  And it has a long, long history.  I wondered why Wikipedia's entry was about movies.  I eventually found the most comprehensive history of the letter X at symbolsage.com HERE. The picture below comes from the article.  It is the unknown and the known, it is rejection and a kiss, it is death and danger.  So much going on with x.

The articles conclusion: "Each of the letters in the alphabet has a history, but X is the most potent and mysterious. Since its inception, it has been used to represent the unknown, and has more social and technical uses than any other letter in the English alphabet. Nowadays, we use the symbol in mathematics, to mark places on a map, to indicate our choice of candidates on a ballot, to indicate an error, and many more." That seems to me to be "spot on". And our photo?  Lake effects fog and mist yesterday morning shrouded the landscape.  I thought the pictures I'd taken would be poor, but it turns out with some processing, some of them are quite nice.

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