He may have a point.
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.
Categorised as: about this blog, writing about ampersands
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