Legal Research

The Friday Fillip

By Simon Fodden

And and and and… and. One thing after another, joined with everyone’s favourite conjunction, the subject of today’s fillip. But because it’s Friday and we’re in a hurry to get to the weekend, we’ll shorten it for you: AND, therefore, becomes

AMPERSAND:
Corruption of ?and per se–and?, the old way of spelling and naming the character &; i.e. ?& by itself = and;? found in various forms in almost all the dialect Glossaries. (Earliest quoted use in the OED is 1837.)

Which is all well and good but what about & itself? As you may know, it’s a contraction of the two letters of the Latin for ‘and,’ et. Contraction is wrong, perhaps: it’s a complicated ligature tying together the two letters, as you can see from some of the lovely examples below, designed to make things easier for scribes. And & is old; it’s been found in Pompeiian graffiti, which puts it at least at 79 AD.

Law firms love &. Seven of Canada’s thirty largest law firms (according to Lexpert) have “and” in their names and all use the ampersand. Why is that? Because the parade of names (that someone once compared to the sound of a barrel bumping down the cellar stairs) is already too long? To create the impression of efficiency? antiquity? modernity? Because the other guys do?

The ampersand has going for it that it’s a place for the type designer to fool around and get fancy. We all have some Platonic notion of what a letter ‘a’ or ‘g’ should look like, for instance; but the ampersand is a one off, a sport among the pedigreed. I’ve set out below some examples from the fonts on my own machine, and these are followed by much lovelier examples borrowed from the website of the great type designers, Hoefler & Frere-Jones.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on May 02, 2008 (boomark / email).