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.
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.
