Last week’s column on Christmas-related idioms and phrases has prompted these queries:
• Is ‘Xmas’ a standard abbreviation of Christmas? Are Xt-mas, X’mas and X-mas standard variants? Are they acceptable?
• What is the origin of the term ‘Xmas’? Is the term ‘Xmas’ used in the US, UK and Australia or only in India?
• Why do we say ‘Merry Christmas’ and not ‘Happy Christmas’?
Let me share an anecdote as my answers to the queries above. About eight years ago, I received an email from an American friend who asked me to forward the email to as many contacts as possible. The email was about the term ‘Xmas’ which according to him is a commercial/secular term and therefore this spelling should not be used in the place of Christmas. His argument is that people who want to take out the ‘Christ’ from ‘Christmas’ have replaced ‘Christ’ with ‘X’ and ‘X’ does not refer to Christ. According to him replacing ‘Christ’ with the letter ‘X’ is meaningless as Christmas is the commemoration of the birth of Jesus Christ and the abbreviation deprecates the spirit of Christmas. In my reply to his email I asked him whether the term ‘Xtian’ of ‘Xian’ for Christian is acceptable to him. His reply was, “these terms are paganisms”. Pagans are those who do not belong to Christianity or Judaism. When I googled the term ‘Xmas’ I found that many Christian leaders had considered the term offensive and expressed their opinion against its usage. For example, in UK, Bishop Alan Chesters recommended to his clergy to avoid the abbreviated term and in the US, in 1977, New Hampshire governor Meldrim Thomson sent out a press release saying that he wanted journalists to keep the ‘Christ’ in Christmas, and not call it Xmas. Many style guides, including the New York Times, The Times, The Guardian, and the BBC, too disapprove of the spelling. For example, the Christian Writers’ Manual of Style states: ‘The abbreviation Xmas for Christmas should be avoided in formal writing. It is appropriate only for advertising copy and is usually considered substandard even there.’ According to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, the modern use of the term is largely limited to advertisements, headlines and banners, where its conciseness is valued. People who communicate using the twitter and other short message services (SMS) use ‘Xmas’ more often than before. The term has been used by writers for over two centuries. ‘Xmas’ derives from Greek and Latin. The letter ‘X’ is the Greek letter ‘chi’ and it is the first letter in the Greek word Χριστός, translated as Christ. The ‘mas’ in Christmas is derived from Latin and it means ‘Mass’, a religious service in memory of Christ’s last supper. Many variants of Xmas — X-mas, Xtmas, Xt-mas, and X’mas are used in greeting cards, advertisements and banners but they are non-standard abbreviations. During Christmas season we greet people ‘Merry Christmas’. The greeting ‘Merry Christmas’ is more common than ‘Happy Christmas’ because the term ‘merry’, which means cheerfulness/joy/gaiety is synonymous with festival. In UK, USA, Australia and many other English-speaking countries people use ‘Merry Christmas’ and also ‘Happy Christmas’.
— rayanal@yahoo.co.uk