X Filing

X may mark the spot, but does it mean anything?

After all, there could be nothing under the spot. The X doesn’t give you an awful lot of information.

That is a small part of the irony accompanying the name change of Twitter to X. Information from X, fka Twitter, can be pretty suspect these days — even meaningless.

There may, however, be commercial meaning. There is now litigation over the X name. A rose by any other name including X would smell as sweet, but you might pay more for a flower with better branding.

At least a company called X Social Media LLC thinks so. It’s the plaintiff in a suitagainst X Corp. — the company formerly known as Twitter — for trademark and service mark infringement.

Branding seems to be really important to this company. The lawsuit could have been written by a guy in an ad agency.

“X Social Media, LLC is a vanguard in utilizing social media and marketing technology to connect consumers with legal services in situations where those harmed would otherwise remain voiceless and without remedy,” the suit announces. “From the company’s inception, the ‘X’ has signified the act of obtaining hope and help via the unprecedented power of social media for people facing a range of injustices.”

I’m picturing the X Social Media heroes flying around with capes and catching bodies falling off skyscrapers.

I guess I shouldn’t have been shocked to discover that X SocialMedia (the space between Social and Media is gone on the website) describes itself as “an advertising agency that specializes in Facebook and Instagram.”

The “hope and help” significance of X, by the way, has been around since way back in 2016. Before that, X was hopeless.

The cynic in me — which is most of me — wants to think that the lawsuit is a ploy to get attention. Most of us have heard of former Twitter. Most of us have not before heard of superhero ad agency X. Now we’ve heard of both.

After all, the letter X has been around a long time and it’s got a lot of meanings and lack of meanings — many of them before 2016.

I think my first encounter with X was in the alphabet. It acquired a meaning of being toward the end.

Then there was The X-Men — a band of mutant social outcast students who had to keep their identities secret to avoid harassment and violence. Stan Lee was a visionary — this was before Internet trolls!

High school algebra was my next exposure to X and the most mysterious. X meant the unknown. The only way to reveal the meaning of X was to solve an equation — and then it was no longer X.

The iterations and mysteries continued. There was The X-Files, there was Mister X (have I mentioned I read a lot of comic books?), there was the Xbox, there were X-rays.

You should now (if you haven’t already) be wondering how anyone could claim X as a trademark. Well, if you’re Elon Musk or an ad agency, you have a lot of nerve.

Maybe that’s all you need.

More darkness. If you’re not depressed enough these days, here’s another sad statement from an Arizona federal judge’s rulinglast week: “The evidence in this case shows that most American hunters will continue to kill leopards in sub-Saharan Africa in the absence of an import permit.”

According to the judge, American hunters don’t care if they’re not given permits to import leopard trophies. Shooting them dead in Africa is all the fun they need.

Sigh.