UPFRONT:SOMETIMES I WISH people I didn't know would stop kissing me. No, not in the flesh, for crying out loud. As if I'd be calling a halt to that! (Only messing, I haven't forgotten I'm about to be wed, people.) I mean when they write to me. It's all XX this and mwah mwah that: if these were real kisses, I'd have some serious questions to answer, not to mention glandular fever. As it is, I just feel a bit – not compromised, exactly – just slightly slavered on.
Admittedly it’s a two-way thing. I’ve embraced the X myself, perhaps too closely, if I’m to be honest. It’s just such good shorthand for signing off on the right kind of correspondence, and now that I seem to be writing e-mails and texts to my friends more often than actually talking to them, I had to find some sort of “love-you-must-dash” equivalent that took me a little less time and space to type. X to the rescue!
The thing is, it’s not supposed to be the equivalent of planting a smacker on the cheek of the recipient, just a cheery ta-ra that’s a little less formal than “fondest regards” or whatever one wrote to one’s loved ones back in the day before the X stepped in. After all, the French have been corresponding with kisses for years, bisous-ing away like it was going out of style, while the Spanish have long been big on the beso.
Yet it makes a little more sense for continentals for whom kissing is your run-of- the-mill salutation to lash one on to the bottom of an e-mail, whereas in a country where kisses are barely blown, let alone exchanged, their sudden ubiquity in e-mails and texts is a little more incongruous.
Yet there it is, the catch-all X, at the end of all manner of messages and about as authentic as an air kiss. According to a friend who is knowledgeable – or at least outspoken – on such matters, we have inherited this alarming tendency from the Brits, who got the whole thing from the Yanks: let this be a lesson in how epidemics are started. The Yanks, of course, have already mutated their strain, and tellingly intersperse their Xs with Os, a practice that has yet to catch on over here (the addition of hugs rendering such a sign-off both touchy and feely, a combination too complex for our national psyche as yet).
Here in Ireland, our female cohort at least have embraced the X, and yet you still don’t find may of the menfolk X-ing each other, which seems to suggest there’s still more to this letter than meets the eye.
There are ways, however, to utilise the X without slobbering: the point, according to said expert friend, is to make it your own. She herself favours the double X sign-off after her own initials, and cautions that a triple is a little too pornographic to be considered appropriate for general correspondence.
Myself I’ve plumped for the lower-case “x” (understated, not sloppy), followed by my lower-case first initial, which I’m hoping comes off as a self-effacing, low-key kind of smacker. The problem is, this “xf” business has become such a habit that the little kisses are making their way into e-mails to those I shouldn’t really be kissing, like friends’ husbands or bank managers or my editor. I’ve even been known to X complete strangers, ending “To whom it may concern” letters with a peck and thus bestowing kisses indiscriminately to all comers like some kind of sign-off slattern.
Yet when I get the equivalent from those I don’t know, I come over all puritan prude, instantly up on my high horse about appropriate e-mail etiquette and “who does he think he is to be X-ing me like that?”.
My responses to such uninvited intimacies tend to follow strict professional lines: “Dear X , I am a consummate professional as you can see by the banality of this correspondence. Insert appropriate content here. Yours sincerely, xf.” D’oh!
Even knowing this – that X has become a habit, a recognised sign-off, devalued and devoid of all kissing connotations – has not stopped some friends (and occasionally, myself) from reading more into correspondence received than would be recommended by Dear Abby. I’ve seen friends fall over themselves with glee when they get an X at the end of an e-mail or text from a desired member of the opposite sex, as if he had planted it in person on their own puckered lips. I’ve also seen the same folk, who’ve been throwing Xs into the ether with wanton abandon, suddenly hesitate when it comes to a sign-off for someone that actually matters. Should that be capital X? Does the insertion of an O dilute the effect, or heighten it?
To X or not to X – that is the burning question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to just take an X where you can get it, or take arms against such e-mail shorthand and by opposing, end it. After all, those who object to the phoniness of Xs can hardly claim that “yours sincerely” is always what it says. Because however you look at it, an X on an e-mail is warmer than the warmest of “Regards”, though certainly no substitute for “Love”. And though X-ing without love is not what our mothers would have counselled, it’s still a lot better than “Best”.