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May 2, 2008

Simon Fodden

The Friday Fillip

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.

ampersands2.png

ampersands3.jpg

Simon Fodden is the founder of Slaw. He taught law at Osgoode Hall Law School for more than 30 years before he retired to focus on writing, publishing, and IT and law.
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4 Comments on “The Friday Fillip”

  1. Steven Matthews says:
    May 2, 2008 at 1:05 pm

    I'm calling it – the ampersand death watch is now on! Followed by a drastic dropping of commas.

    Within 5 years, the vast majority of major Canadian firms will rebrand without the '&'.

    Davis & Co moving to Davis LLP was just the beginning. And you can quote (") me on that. ;)

  2. Simon Fodden says:
    May 2, 2008 at 2:04 pm

    Steve, I'll take a piece of that action. I agree entirely. I'd even expect to see the word "and" cropping up where ampersand was before.

  3. Connie Crosby says:
    May 2, 2008 at 4:27 pm

    Well, my favourite law firm Weir & Foulds dropped the ampersand–and the spaces!–to become WeirFoulds a number of years ago. Can't get much more "modern" than that!

  4. Steven Matthews says:
    May 2, 2008 at 4:48 pm

    How about the lower case jump? weirfoulds

    Takes a brave marketing director… :)

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