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"It would have been confusing to say “X, Y, Z, and.” So, the students said, “and per se and.” Per se means “by itself,” so the students were essentially saying,
by paulkrush 3y ago
"It would have been confusing to say “X, Y, Z, and.” So, the students said, “and per se and.” Per se means “by itself,” so the students were essentially saying, “X, Y, Z, and by itself and.” The term per se was used to denote letters that also doubled as words, such as the letter I (for “me”) and A. By saying “per se,” you clarified that you meant the symbol and not the word.
Over time, “and per se and” was slurred together into the word we use today: ampersand."
- caturopath 3y agoA and I used to sometimes get 'per se' to clarify that people were referring to the letter, not the one-letter word
- asciimov 3y agoI have seen this explanation printed so many times, and unattributed, that I wonder if students of that era actually said "and per se and".
- tgv 3y agoMe too, but given certain educational methods of the past, I can also imagine it happening. Here's an example of teaching Latin in the 19th century. Read the first 1/3 from the link from today's front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36354213 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36354213. Latin was taught by rote, by repeating without understanding. One of those head masters must once have thought it would be correct to call it "and per se and," and had the power to make generations do it. On the other hand, why it would have become so widespread as to become a word is what makes me doubt the story.
- mbg721 3y agoSome probably did, the same ones that addressed their dad as "pay-ter".
- rossitter 3y agoFrom The Frumentary by William King (1699)[0]: U’s conversation ’s equal to his wine, You sup with W, whene’er you dine: X, Y, and Z, hating to be confin’d, Ramble to the next Eating-house they find;... And Per Se And alone, as Poets use... See also an elaborate classroom game described in the Documents of the Board of Education of the City of New York (1861)[1]: "One [student] represents &—called ‘And per se and’—as being appended to the alphabet, but not belonging to it....The merriment of this pastime turns upon the endeavor of An’ per s’and to take precedence of Z, and so get fairly into the alphabet..." [0] A 1781 printing: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101068156031&view=1up&seq=17 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101068156031&vi... [1] https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433075984876&view=1up&seq=485 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433075984876&vi...
- sanderjd 3y agoThese are great. Did you just know about these already or did you research them just now? If the latter, how did you find these in such short order? Always impressed by people who can find primary sources for things quickly!
- behnamoh 3y agoAnd here I thought ampersand had something to do with Ampere, the unit of electric current…
- onionisafruit 3y agoI really like this as an alt etymology. If it got popularized to save characters in telegrams, it could have been the “electric and”. Another way it could be from Ampere is that his son was a philologist and could have conceivably promoted the idea of an ampersand.
- Pigalowda 3y agoCicero’s educated Greek body slave, Tiro, invented it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Tullius_Tiro https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Tullius_Tiro https://creativepro.com/ampersand-history-usage/#:~:text=The%20invention%20of%20the%20ampersand,Notes%2C%20which%20included%20the%20ampersand https://creativepro.com/ampersand-history-usage/#:~:text=The....
- I_complete_me 3y agoI think you might be confusing ampersand with the Tironian et which looks like a 7 - Unicode point U+204A. It is still visible in Ireland on the old Post 7 Telegraph boxes. Tiro invented a shorthhand system and his Tironian et represented the sound "et". I recently dived into this whole subject so it's kinda fresh in my mind.
- Pigalowda 3y agoMaybe the second link i provided has it wrong. You seem to know more so I defer to you.
- I_complete_me 3y agoFrom the book “Shady Characters” by Keith Houston "Among Tiro’s notae was an innocuous character representing the Latin word et, or “and.” Though this was only one symbol among many (in their most elaborate medieval form, a system descended from Tiro’s original cipher comprised some fourteen thousand glyphs), the utility of Tiro’s system ensured that his et sign would considerably outlive both its creator and its sponsor. This was not, however, the storied ampersand: when Tiro created his so-called Tironian et, the ampersand was still more than a century away." The book itself is worth a read for all the other punctuation marks it discusses.
- kokanee 3y agoI’ve heard some people say that as a child they thought the letter before P was “Elemeno.” So it certainly tracks that if you ask kids to recite “and per se and” that they might think the whole phrase is the name of the letter.
- koheripbal 3y agoMy kids thought Elmo was part of the alphabet for an embarrassing amount of time.
- doodlebugging 3y agoThis is why I taught my kids to sing the alphabet forwards and backwards. If you sing it forwards it can sound like you are saying "elemental pee" which sounds scientifically interesting but doesn't help anyone learn what that letter is supposed to look like. We used wooden alphabet puzzles as a guide so it could reinforce the idea the you are saying L-M-N-O pretty fast. Since the ABC song is one of three songs that use the same tune it is easy to teach an infant or toddler their alphabet as you sing them to sleep. The ABC song, Baa-Baa Black Sheep, Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star all use the same tune. Add in the backwards ABC's and you get four songs sung with the same tune so that the whole thing becomes tonally monotonous and soothing and it will tend to relax your child as you rock and sing. With practice I got pretty good at mixing verses from these four songs on the fly so that the song eventually morphed into a single tune with disconnected lyrics. I used it as a challenge to keep myself awake while I rocked them to sleep. For grins, the Backward ABC lyrics are: Z, y, x, w, v, u, t... S, r, q, p, o, n, m... L, k, j, i, h, g, f... E, d, c, b, and a. Now I've sung them backwards to you, Can you sing them backwards too? Pretty easy to see how each letter breaks free of the original forward limitations.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y agoI like this post, but I cannot get your backwards ABC rhythm to make sense.
- rocketbop 3y ago
- atdrummond 3y agoThe reason I’m inclined to accept this narrative is that not only have I not seen any plausible alternative etymology, there is no alternative etymology available period.
- HWR_14 3y agoI would recommend against that methodology. A lot of etymology is not easy to find, but plausible etymology is easy to make up.
- mauvehaus 3y agoYou must know my wife. She's quite confident that the idiom "balls to the wall" has something to do with a person being put up against a wall to be executed by gunshot.
- throwaway894345 3y agoYep, I learned this from the History of English podcast. I highly recommend it for anyone who likes this sort of trivia about the evolution of English.