And And And
OK, this is pretty pointless, but it keeps popping up in my head, so I’ll put it here.
When I was a kid, I thought the ampersand (&) was a pretty weird thing. It showed up in print all the time in place of the word “and”. It had a weird name with too many syllables in it. It was one of those characters that they didn’t teach you how to make when they taught you your numbers and letters, and I didn’t know anybody who actually wrote that symbol in Real Life. It looked kind of, but not quite, like a G-clef in music ( Clef - Wikipedia ) (Tom Weller points out the similarity, amusingly, in his wonderful book CVLTVRE MADE STVPID). If I tried to make an ampersand, I ended up drawing a sort of bad capital “S”.
What people did use, in everyday life, as an abbreviation for and was a plus sign, but often made in an odd way.
I don’t know about you (although I suspect you do it the same way), but I was taught to make a “plus” sign by first drawing the vertical stroke with a downward motion, then, lifting my pen or pencil, to make the horizontal stroke from left to right.
What I saw my mother do, when making her “and” sign was to basically draw a “plus” sign this way, but without lifting her pen. So you ended up with what looked like a plus sign with a little extra curl in the upper left quadrant. It looked like this:
Flash forward several years. I’m doing background research for a historical article I’m researching, and I’m going through late seventeenth and early eighteenth century documents (actually, I’m mostly looking at microfilms and photostats of these documents, but I got to hold a few real ones in my gloved hands). The documents are filled with abbreviations, especially “and”. From the way they drew them, they appeared to be the wat my mom made her “plus” sign in the not-lift-from-the-paper method, so they have that upper-left-quadrant curl in them.
But I start to notice something peculiar. These aren’t exactly like plus signs, because the return “up” stroke doesn’t exactly go straight up along the downward stroke, but veer off to the left. The resulting figure doesn’t exactly look like a “plus sign plus curl”, but like an “ampersand on its side”, as if someone gave a standard upright ampersand a violent shove from the right side that pushed it onto its convex left side and now, like an upturned turtle, the ampersand couldn’t get up.
I suddenly realize that this is how an ampersand is properly drawn. You don’t draw a misshapen “S” You make the motions of a “plus sign” without lifting your pen from the paper, and you draw it rotated from the way a print ampersand looks if rotated almost ninety degrees counter-clockwise.
I thought I had finally solved the Mystery of the Ampersand. The ampersand and the plus sign are basically the same.
Only, when I looked into the history of the ampersand, it seems the accepted version is different. The ampersand (whose name comes from “and per se”, in essence) is a corrupted form of the latin word “et”, the letters connected by a ligature. Of course, the “plus” sign itself is apparently derived from “et”, as well, but the lineages seem to be distinct. The plus sign results from basically eliminating the “e”, while the ampersand is the result of an evolutionary process that incorporates both letters, which is why the typeface ampersand retains that curl that the plus sign lacks.
Still, I can’t help thinking that there’s a closer relationship between the ampersand and the casual “plus-as-and-with-the-curl” than the accepted histories imply.
See pp. 229+ (or 229 &):
