Happy Ampersand Day!
I love punctuation and was going to write about some obscure ones. However, after an hour spent trying to find a way to type an exclamation comma, I decided that if MS Word, Unicode, and the internet didn’t want me to have this defunct symbol, I wasn’t going to write about it. (If you are curious what an exclamation comma is, check out this Grammar Girl post.)
I’ll get over my disappointment about the exclamation comma (I really want to use it), but in the meantime, let’s talk about the ampersand.
Why does a symbol that means “and” look like “&”? It turns out the ampersand we are all familiar with is a newer style called Carolingian. The older ampersand style was Italic, and it looks like a stylized “e” and “t.” Et was a Latin word that meant “and.” (click here to see the two different designs.)
I love it when questions have easy answers. I’m going to go use an ampersand in my short story of the day.