![\"ampersands.png\"](\"http:\/\/www.robertlpeters.com\/news2013\/wp-content\/uploads\/ampersands.png\")
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From H&FJ<\/a>\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cThough it feels like a modern appendix to our ancient alphabet, the ampersand is considerably older than many of the letters that we use today. By the time the letter W entered the Latin alphabet in the seventh century, ampersands had enjoyed six hundred years of continuous use; one appears in Pompeiian graffiti, establishing the symbol at least as far back as A.D. 79. One tidy historical account credits Marcus Tullius Tiro, Cicero\u2019s secretary, with the invention of the ampersand, and while this is likely a simplified retelling, it\u2019s certainly true that Tiro was a tireless user of scribal abbreviations. One surviving construction of the ampersand bears his name, and keen typophiles can occasionally find the \u2018Tironian and\u2019<\/a> out in the world today.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAs both its function and form suggest, the ampersand is a written contraction of \u201cet,\u201d the Latin word for \u201cand.\u201d Its shape has evolved continuously since its introduction, and while some ampersands are still manifestly e-t ligatures, others merely hint at this origin, sometimes in very oblique ways. The many forms that a font\u2019s ampersand can follow are generally informed by its historical context, the whims of its designer, and the demands of the type family that contains it: (see a tour of some ampersands and the thinking behind them, along with an explanation of the storied history of the word \u201campersand\u201d itself on the Hoefler & Frere-Jones www.typography.com<\/em> site here<\/a>).<\/p>\n \u201cAs for the word \u201campersand,\u201d folk etymologies abound. The likeliest account, offered by the OED, is explained by early alphabet primers in which the symbol was listed after X, Y, Z as \u201c&: per se, and.\u201d Meaning \u201c&: in itself, \u2018and\u2019\u201d, and inevitably pronounced as \u201cand per se and,\u201d it\u2019s a quick corruption to \u201campersand,\u201d and the rest is history. Though I do like one competing explanation offered by a retired signpainter I once met, who insisted that the symbol got its name from its inventor, and was henceforth known to the trade as Amper\u2019s And. This Mr. Amper has never surfaced, nor have any of his contemporaries who lent their names to competing models; I would have liked to see Quick\u2019s And, on which this tale is surely built.\u201d\u2014JH<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From H&FJ\u2026 \u201cThough it feels like a modern appendix to our ancient alphabet, the ampersand is considerably older than many of the letters that we use today. By the time the letter W entered the Latin alphabet in the seventh century, ampersands had enjoyed six hundred years of continuous use; one appears in Pompeiian graffiti, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5,6,7,16,17,18],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/robertlpeters.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/robertlpeters.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/robertlpeters.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robertlpeters.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robertlpeters.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=610"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/robertlpeters.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16904,"href":"https:\/\/robertlpeters.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610\/revisions\/16904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/robertlpeters.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robertlpeters.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robertlpeters.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}