The Redheaded Adopted Child of the Alphabet

You come home from school and it is lurking inside your backpack. You walk through an intersection only to have it glaring at you. It warns you of wayward animals jumping across the street. The letter X is everywhere it seems; but why? What function does it serve in all reality? Other than having a cool sounding name and an easy symbol for kindergarteners to draw, what good does it do the hard working people who have to deal with this nuisance of a letter?

To be blunt, the letter X is in the middle of an identity crisis. He doesn’t quite know what to do and where to go. He has no clue what sound to make or when he is needed. He is desperate to try to fit in with the end of the alphabet so he throws himself into xylophone. Sure, Z was nice enough to share a few of his words but why should one letter have to suffer for another’s confusion? It just isn’t fair to let X make any sounds he wants just for him to have a useful role in the grand scheme of the alphabet. Even when X isn’t stealing sounds from more responsible letters, he is unable to do a job by himself. If he was a real letter, one with confidence and some backbone, the word exit would simply be spelt xit. But no! it seems he can’t even do that simple job for himself.

It’s not like X is marking new territory. He doesn’t even make a sound that is uniquely his own; that none can copy without the help of the original. Unless this useless annoyance in the alphabet shapes up, I fear the other letters will have no choice but to replace him with new combinations of letters. Exit will become egzit. Xylophone will finally be spelled how it was meant to – zylophone. You may be thinking to yourself Oh come on, that’ll never happen. Well, you, my friend, have been hiding under a rock for the last couple of centuries. The letter X has already began to withdraw its presence from our language. The word escape was not always spelled that way; in fact, it originally was spelled excape. X has a long history, longer than any of us know, of letting down those people who put their faith in this lazy, inept, and completely useless letter.

But not all is bleak in this underdog’s future. With the laziness of mankind, a new source of hope springs for this hapless figure. The new frontier of abbreviation gives new light to this almost lost letter. X has found new refuge in such words as Xing, Xfer, and X-mas. It has evened paired up with the infamous O to send warm wishes in the form of hugs and kisses. It is in these uncharacteristic uses of letters that X has found its last bastion of safety from complete annihilation. It may appear that X has finally found his work ethic and has learned from his mistakes . . . and that is what he wants you to think. He is, an all reality, up to his same old tricks. The same laziness that got himself into this mess to begin with. He is still just taking other letters’ hard earned sounds and combinations and making them his own. X is merely looking for a quick fix to a complicated solution. If he continues in his ways, the alphabet may regret their adoption of this redheaded orphan and send him packing onto the streets, destroying his influence, and in essence, making him cease to egzist.