CRAIG CONLEY (Prof. Oddfellow) is recognized by Encarta as “America’s most creative and diligent scholar of letters, words and punctuation.” He has been called a “language fanatic” by Page Six gossip columnist Cindy Adams, a “cult hero” by Publisher’s Weekly, a “monk for the modern age” by George Parker, and “a true Renaissance man of the modern era, diving headfirst into comprehensive, open-minded study of realms obscured or merely obscure” by Clint Marsh. An eccentric scholar, Conley’s ideas are often decades ahead of their time. He invented the concept of the “virtual pet” in 1980, fifteen years before the debut of the popular “Tamagotchi” in Japan. His virtual pet, actually a rare flower, still thrives and has reached an incomprehensible size. Conley’s website is OneLetterWords.com.
It's not as simple as X marking a spot on the map. "There were people from North X, South X, East X, and West X, from X Upper Corner, X Lower Corner, and X Four Corners, and everybody had brought his uncle and cousins." From St. Nicholas, 1879.
Here are someone whose hair is on fire and the unknown Madame X. From Le Journal Amusant, 1898. For dozens upon dozens of surprising meanings of the letter X, see our very own One-Letter Words: A Dictionary.
[Inexplicable images from generations ago invite us to restore the lost
sense of immediacy. We follow the founder of the Theater of
Spontaneity, Jacob Moreno, who proposed stringing together "now and then
flashes" to unfetter illusion and let imagination run free. The images
we have collected for this series came at a tremendous price, which we explained previously.]
[Inexplicable images from generations ago invite us to restore the lost
sense of immediacy. We follow the founder of the Theater of
Spontaneity, Jacob Moreno, who proposed stringing together "now and then
flashes" to unfetter illusion and let imagination run free. The images
we have collected for this series came at a tremendous price, which we explained previously.]
Barrels of whiskey and moonshine are traditionally labeled with X's (one X being weakest and three X's being strongest, as we learn in One-Letter Words: A Dictionary). But lesser-known is that coffee used to be roasted to a XXXX strength. Our vintage coffee ad is from c. 1890. The four X's on the vintage Coca Cola postcard below are, we think, unrelated.