X was a "slash" drawn in concentration and torture camps during the American civil wars, beyond which prisoners could not cross.
Stories say that the American soldiers from the Northern or Southern alliance would often place food beyond this "slash" and prisoners were made to stand on the other side of the "slash".
If the starved prisoners would cross this line to take the food, they'd be shot to death.
By very literal etymology, this came to be known as X, meaning the slash you don't cross if you want to die.
The very same strategy was used by the Japanese soldiers in WWII.
Other stories mention this slash being a partition between two pieces of land, beyond which prisoners would be shot at point blank.
in simple words, then, X was the "slash" beyond which prisoners were liable to be shot.
Today, X literally refers to the temporal limit for the resolution of a task,
X?
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