… in one sense / use of yes: ‘yes, I select this one’. Which came up yesterday as I was ordering an Original Italian Sub from the Jersey Mike’s Subs in Mountain View CA, just south of Palo Alto (they’re a huge national chain, offering a wide range of submarine sandwiches that are, in my experience, excellent examples of their kind — and Grubhub delivers from them); it turns out that their on-line menu software involves this positive selection-X, which took me a moment to get used to, especially since I’d posted not long ago on associations of the letter X, which included the X of NO — of prohibitions, bans, and denials — but not the X of YES. Well, X is a symbol, it’s just stuff (as I say) and can accumulate any number of uses, even ones that look contradictory.
The Jersey Mike X is the X of election ballots: an alternative to a check-mark ✓ or a plus-sign + in a box or circle (or to filling in an oval) to indicate selecting an item. In a use that was initially confusing to me, since the JM X is in contrast with the JM +, which turns out to convey something like ‘this is one of the available choices’; I eventually figured out how JM deploys X and + through a certain amount of trial-and-error fiddling with the menus. Yes, I’ll illustrate all of this in a little while.
But first, one more groaner penguin-pun joke, on the occasion of my consuming, at lunch today, the last of my birthday McVitie’s Penguin bars.
