X, O, and the K-word

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The challenge of letter X comes around again today at ABC Wednesday meme.

Tic-tac-toe is not the only fun way to use X and O.

Remember the era when we still wrote letters on stationery--and signed them with XOXO under our signature?
OK, it's easy to imagine hugging arms looking like the O. That is a recent North American addition to XOXO.
But how did X come to stand for "kiss"?
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Apparently this custom started in the early Christian era. To sign with "X" gave a document the validity of a sworn oath. The X was the first Greek letter of the Greek name Xristos (Jesus) and the X cross mark symbolized the cross.
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Many people were illiterate until even as recently as 150 years ago. So signing X took the place of a full signature. To show the importance of the mark, people would kiss it, just like they reverently put their lips to a Bible or crucifix.
This practice led to the idea of X representing a kiss.
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To Jews, however, X was an evil sign (as Leo Rosten recounts in The Joys of Yiddish) which represented the horrors of crucifixion [Jesus was not the only Jew crucified by the Romans, remember] as well as being the symbol of their Christian oppressors.
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So when waves of Jews, many of them illiterate or writing only non-Latin alphabets, entered Ellis Island in New York, they refused to sign the immigration forms with the customary X.
Instead they drew a circle.
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The Yiddish word for "circle" is kikel (pronounced ky-kel).
The American immigration inspectors started calling anyone who signed with an O a "kikel." Soon this was shortened to "kike."
Jewish-American merchants continued to sign with O instead of X for several decades, spreading the nickname kike wherever they went as a natural result.
At that time it was not a bad word. Only later did it develop into a racial slur.
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Apropos, you might also enjoy (?) my previous X-letter post; it's about xenophobia. :-)
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