One designer lists his ten favorite examples of the ampersand.

From Smashing Magazine. Sent in by Chris.

I am going to add this one to the articles section.

He mentions The Elements of Typographic Style. Mandatory reading for anyone who cares about design and typography.

Oh, and Neatorama agrees.

Since I was a child I have been fascinated with the ampersand. I used to type my high school papers on a typewriter and that key always stood out to me. “Eh” Be” “Cee” “Dee” “Dollar Sign” “Ampersand?” It was such a strange character and had such a foreign-sounding name. “Why is it called an ampersand?” I used to wonder. Was it invented by a Mr. Amper (Amper’s and)? Was there such thing as an amper and if so was what was their plurality manifest in an “&”? Years later I found out that the ampersand was a ligature of “e” and “t” thus forming the latin word “et” meaning “and: but I still didn’t know what this ampers business was all about. A few years ago I tracked down the origin, and now I feel somewhat complete where this symbolic conjunction is concerned: The word “ampersand” is derived from the explanation one might give to explain what the “&” symbol represents. One might write, “&” per se “and” (the ampersand symbol to say the word “and”). Now, speak this sentence aloud several times quickly and you and you’ll know how the term was derived, “And per se and. And per se and. And per se and. Andperseand. Ampersand.”

Just a note. When I first learned this DTP (graphic design) stuff in the mid-80′s – there was no one to teach it, so we all learned by flying by the seat of our pants.

To this end, I did some serious study of typography, scouring the local library for any and all books about the subject.

One thing came up about the ampersand (BTW I agree with you about the lovliness [sic] of the ligature). It is not strictly a replacement for “and.” According to my research, there is a “possessive” quality to the ampersand, and to simply replace “and” with an amperand [sic] is not correct in all cases.

For example, “Sanford & Son” is a correct usage, but “Moving & Storage” is not.

I don’t know if this matters to you, you may just be in it for the typography, but I always thought it was an interesting “factoid.”

Michael

I’ve never heard this before. Yes, I know I am the curator of the ampersand blog, but some of the granular details of proper ampersand usage are beyond me. Thoughts? Corrections? Please leave a comment or email if you have something to add. I want to hear from the real grammar folks on this one.

Craig Conley writes:

Which came first: Ampersand Stream, or Lake, or Mountain? Here’s an intriguing explanation from The Gentleman’s Magazine, 1892:

Ampersand is a mountain. It is a lake. It is a stream. The mountain stands in the heart of the Adirondack country, just near enough to the thoroughfare of travel for thousands of people to see it every year, and just far enough away from the beaten track to be unvisited, except by a very few of the wise ones who love to digress. Behind the mountain is the lake, which no lazy man has ever seen. Out of the lake flows the stream, winding down a long, untrodden forest valley, until at length it joins the Stony Creek waters, and empties into the Raquette River. Which of the three Ampersands has the prior claim to the name I cannot tell.

Philosophically speaking, the mountain ought to be regarded as the father of the family, because it was undoubtedly there before the others existed. And the lake was probably the next on the ground, because the stream is its child. But man is not strictly correct in his nomenclature; and I conjecture that the little river, the last-born of the three, was the first to be called Ampersand, and then gave its name to its parent and grandparent. It is such a crooked stream, so bent and curved and twisted upon itself, so fond of turning around unexpected corners, and sweeping away in great circles from its direct course, that its first explorers christened it after the eccentric supernumerary of the alphabet which appears in the old spelling book as &.

From the oneletterwords blog. Thanks. Just wondering, but did that illustration accompany the original article?

Hi…

I like typography. I like ampersands.

You say: “I like the ampersand. I think it is often the most attractive punctuation mark of them all.”

BUT… I hope this doesn’t come across as cranky. Is the ampersand a punctuation mark? Isn’t it more like an abbreviation?

One doesn’t use it to punctuate a sentence. “You need to correct the punctuation in that sentence” wouldn’t refer to an awkward or incorrect use of an ampersand.

If someone wrote a sentence by hand and wrote an ampersand backwards, would we say “you need to punctuate that sentence properly”?

Putting an ampersand in the wrong place is a TOTALLY different kind of error from putting a comma in the wrong place…

Wuh duh yuh think?

Tom

He is right. The ampersand is most accurately a character and historically ligature and not really a punctuation mark at all. Corrections will be made.

The proper usage of the ampersand is something important to me. My love for the ampersand is deepest on the aesthetic and typographic level because I am a designer, but I always appreciate the perspective from the grammatical and linguistic angle.

According to Google Translate, this page actually says:

Jan Tschichold †: shape wall of the lungs Et symbol (Reprint of the essay “form changing face of Et character” of 1953)
Andreas Stötzner: Anatomy and the example of the metamorphosis Et mark

With passenger and heading Register

This edition contains a total of 528 individually shown and proven examples of Et characters, spanning the period from 79 AD to the present. It will also late epigraphic examples.

Shape wall of the lungs? I suspect Google Translate is not perfect. Damn, I wish I spoke German. Nina does. Thank you for sending this in.