Grammar girl here. This week I have a quick and dirty tip about Xmas versus Christmas.

A piece exploring why people stopped using the pronouns V and Thou, and survey results about

who says Kitty Corner and who says Catty Corner.

Many listeners have asked about the origin, meaning, and appropriateness of Xmas, the abbreviation

for Christmas. Retailers have long been accused of secularizing Christmas by using Xmas

in signs and advertisements. Therefore, I suspect many of you will be surprised to learn

that Xmas has a religious origin. In Greek, the letter Kai is written as an X,

and Kai is the first letter of the Greek word for Christ.

Greeks sometimes abbreviated Christ as X, and around 300 AD, the Roman Emperor Constantine I,

started using the symbol XP to symbolize Christ. In that use, XP stands for the Greek

letters Kai Rho, which are the first two letters of the Greek word for Christ.

Constantine symbol superimposed the letters in a stylized way, and it's been drawn in many

different ways over the years, so although you've probably seen the symbol, you may not have

realized that it was two letters. I'll put a picture of it on the transcript of the Xmas article

at quickandertitytips.com. Xmas, of course, is much newer than the XP symbol, but it's definitely

not the result of recent commercialization. The Oxford English Dictionary shows 1551 as the first

year Xmas was used to mean Christmas in English. As for appropriateness, Xmas may have a religious

origin and fit better on signs, but many people, both those who use Xmas and those who complain

about its use, are unaware of its religious origin. Some style guides recommend against using

Xmas, and if you do choose to use it, you should know that some people won't be happy.

And that was your quick and dirty tip. Next, I have a piece I've really enjoyed researching.

A couple of weeks ago, after I talked about how the pronoun you fills so many different roles,

...