This post is a little outside the usual Irreal sphere of interest but its subject matter is so delightfully geeky and interesting that I couldn’t resist writing about it. Over at the hot word (on Dictionary.com) they ask, “What character was removed from the alphabet but is still used every day?” The answer, of course, is the ampersand.
It turns out that the ampersand was once the 27th character of the alphabet. That’s vaguely interesting in a Jeopardy answer sort of way but it’s the rest of the story that really captured my imagination. The first surprise is the origin of the shape of the character. By the first century Romans were using cursive writing so the linked e and t of et, Latin for and, came to take on the shape of the modern day ampersand. You can see that clearly on this Adobe page about the ampersand. The hot word post recommends the William Caslon font (Figure 6) as a particularly striking example of this but I find Figure 9 even more so.
The second surprise is how the character came to be called an ampersand. In the early 1800s, when the ampersand was still considered part of the alphabet, school children reciting their ABCs would end with “X, Y, Z, and per se and.” Per se means “by itself” so they were saying, “X, Y, Z, and by itself and.” The hot word explains that that was to avoid the clumsy ending “X, Y, Z, and.” Over time the “and per se and” became slurred together into the word ampersand.
There’s many more interesting facts in the hot word post so you should go on over and take a look. Among other things, you’ll learn that the slurring that produced “ampersand” from “and per se and” is called a mondegreen. If you follow the link they give, you’ll discover where the name mondegreen came from. It’s another interesting story.