#72 – X

Etymology and lXicography are fascinating subjects, dedicated to understanding how language develops as it does, and offering some insight into the way we speak and write today. However, despite centuries of study, eminent linguists are at a loss as to X-plain one thing: why bogans will pay for anything with the letter X on it.

Like backpackers to a sperm bank, bogans began to gravitate towards any product with a large (often colourful) ‘X’ on the packaging. The trend was slow in forming. First, perhaps, was Xmas. The bogan, with its love of tXt-friendly abbreviations – well before tXting X-isted – embraced Xmas, possibly the first step in this process. A basic, secular way of taking Jesus out of Jesus’ birthday, Xmas spoke to the bogan need for simplicity, even as they spent a great deal of time decrying the political correctness gone mad of a fictional nativity scene at a fictional school being cancelled in order to avoid offending local terrorists.

Around the same time, bogan forebears fell in love with INXS, a band whose simple, personalised plate-ready moniker suggested that despite their stunning international success, they simply arrived before their time. Soon, quick-thinking marketing types were thumping every product they had with a massive X. The X was closely linked to X-tremeness, and despite the fact that these products were often X-tremely shit, X-tremely X-pensive and X-tremely unnecessary, bogans adopted them in droves.

Pepsi wanted to sell diet pepsi to bogan males, so labelled it Pepsi MAX. Porn wasn’t proper porn unless it was XXX. Simon Cowell realised that Pop Idol was shit, so made it again and called it X-Factor, and conquered the UK. Functional water absolutely had to have a variety called XXX. Hollywood X-ecutives also moved in. They created the X-Files to fan the flames of bogan conspiracy theories. They then skipped a whole bunch of steps in the creative process – including plot, character and script – and did two things; hired Vin Diesel and made a film called XXX, secure in the knowledge that bogans would flock to see a film with that many Xs. That the film contained zero faux-lesbianism (this X, being silent, is incidentally confusing to the bogan) was only ameliorated by a scene involving Diesel snowboarding faster than an avalanche, just like they would expect to see in the X-games.

Bogans soon began inserting the letter X into names that it had no place being in in the first place, pumping out Jaxon after Saxon.The bogan has yet to discover The xx, although it can’t be long now. Also, after creating so many new X-isting new generation bogans, the older bogan – some from generation X – often realises that there is one X it can’t stand. Its X-husband. Or the X-chromosome.

X