>...conforming to daft spellings like R*man and Xtian - are compulsions.<

I assume some on TMA insert an asterisk into the word 'Roman' because of their dislike for most things Roman.

The 'X' of Xitan is not a daft spelling at all. As I've pointed out before, the word Xmas stems from the Greek letter X (chi) representing the first letter of the Greek 'Christos' (Christ). The word Xmas is first recorded in the English language in 1551 (CDE) and is therefore not a modern invention as some may think. People might do well to check their etymological dictionaries before launching into a thread of 'X' number of posts, taking some twenty minutes to read, which in the end signifies nothing other than a waste of time - time that might have been better spent seeding my summer's crop of <i>shitake</i> mushrooms ;-)