Saturday, March 14, 2009

XP: Not a version of Windows, but a Catholic symbol: ☧

Today I was at Mass at St. Pius X in St. John's, Newfoundland, and noticed a very common symbol, XP. Usually it's stylized as:





XP are the first 2 letters of Christ's name in Greek - chi rho. The full name is ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ. Also, it can be written as: Χριστός.

Notice, this has nothing to do with Windows. In fact, when you think about it, Windows seems like it uses a lot of Catholic words. For example:

Images and Icons: Nowadays these terms refer to large pictures or smaller representations of larger pictures. Prior to their use in computer language, "images" and "icons" were representations of God, Mary, and the saints. Catholics do not worship images or icons, but they use them to remind themselves of a saint or God.

Path: Catholics see this as the path to Heaven, by following Christ. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. However, in computer language this means where a file is located.

If you can think of any more, please let me know!

Thanks.

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