A Conversation for The Quite Interesting Society
QI ~ And so do you know it ?
pedro Posted Feb 20, 2012
How it's written's got something to do with being a stylised 'et', from Latin.
QI ~ And so do you know it ?
McKay The Disorganised Posted Feb 20, 2012
You'd have thought so, but no. Ampers Sand has been largely overlooked by history and his career in sheep wrestling has been confined to the footnotes of history, possibly because of his later arrest for bestiality, but equally because nobody has ever heard of him.
Good try but no.
QI ~ And so do you know it ?
McKay The Disorganised Posted Feb 20, 2012
Pedro - indeed the Latin et written in the cursive script has everything to do with why it looks like it does, and it used to be called 'and' so why is it now ampersand ?
QI ~ And so do you know it ?
toybox Posted Feb 20, 2012
Ampersand is medieval rhyming slang for 'and'.
QI ~ And so do you know it ?
aka Bel - A87832164 Posted Feb 20, 2012
A3599346 - there's your answer (last paragraph)
QI ~ And so do you know it ?
McKay The Disorganised Posted Feb 20, 2012
Yeah that's it Bel, but I'll re-write the explanation here.
Children saying their alphabet would end with X Y Z and AND ~ which sounds strange so a bit o extra Latin popped in ~ X Y Z and 'per se' AND, meaning and 'on its own' &.
Over time this became corrupted into X Y Z ampersand, and eventually just disappeared from the alphabet into an abreviation.
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QI ~ And so do you know it ?
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