Why does 30 mean the end

B2B PR writing has its own set of rules. Here are 10 essential elements to keep in mind as you put together an earned media placement. Why is this, and what does it mean? But how did this come to be? Why a random number with two hyphens? Adam Smartschan linkedin profile. Submitted by -. Signature: Topic imported and archived. In order to signal the end of a transmission, it was necessary to have a code for the end of a transmission that was unmistakably not part of the transmission itself.

This code was the sequence XXX, which, many decades before the rise of the pornographic film industry, was unlikely to occur as a part of the actual story. This type of typographically unusual combination is common in journalism: the deliberately misspelled lede for "lead," the abbreviation TK for "to come," and the use of meaningless Latin as a placeholder for actual text, are all intended to be clear signals that something is still missing, and the words being used are not part of the real story.

XXX as an indication of completeness came to be read as thirty because of the interpretation of the meaningless X's as the Roman numeral for the number Eventually thirty developed its own figurative senses, so that in addition to meaning 'the end of a transmission', it could mean 'the end of anything ', as 'the end of a workshift' or even 'the end of life; death'.

These extended uses are no doubt rather rare beyond jounalism circles. Signature: Reply imported and archived. Mythology rules. I always heard that was used because it was difficult to set in old-fashioned typesetting machines. It's not all that hard on a typewriter, so Leif's official explanation actually makes a lot of sense. An instrument for receiving telegraphic impulses that emits the sounds from which the message is read.

Ludlum, xxix. So it's a term whose meaning is lost on many younger journalists. The venerable "" caused some mischief in late July at the New York Times when a reporter typed it at the end of his article about the shooting of two police officers in Brooklyn. The published version of the story said that a trial was scheduled for February 30, which doesn't occur even in the leapest of leap years.

Said a subsequent Times correction: "The error occurred when an editor saw the symbol '' typed at the bottom of the reporter's article and combined it with the last word, 'February. Some say the mark began during a time when stories were submitted via telegraph, with "" denoting "the end" in Morse code.

Another theory suggests that the first telegraphed news story had 30 words. The Roman numerals XXX translate to But these are hardly the only explanations, theories and guesses for the rise of "". It is rumored that a letter to an East India company ended with "80," a figure meaning "farewell" in Bengali.