Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Ampersands

Episode Date: July 26, 2021

Alex Schmidt is joined by writer/podcaster Kat Angus ('I Hate It But I Love It' podcast) and comedian/podcaster John Cullen ('Blocked Party' podcast) for a look at why ampersands are secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

Ampersands, known for being and signs. Famous for that. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why ampersands are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode. A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. My guests today are Kat Angus and John Cullen. Kat Angus is a writer and a hilarious podcaster. Kat co-hosts the podcast entitled I Hate It But I Love It, which has the amazing nickname I High By Lie. That's a show where Kat and her co-host Jocelyn Getty explore pop culture that gives you both those feelings. Also, you can swing by katangus.substack.com for her fantastic

newsletter. It's called Kat Watches Everything. Of course, there are links in the episode links. And John Cullen is a hilarious stand-up comedian. He has a great album called Long Stories for No Reason. It's that and more. John also does a ton of great podcasting. He co-hosts a show called Blocked Party, and on Blocked Party, John and his co-host Stefan Heck bring on a guest to talk about the most significant time that guest got blocked on social media, usually Twitter. John and Stefan and guests are all very funny, and then also the show goes tons of directions beyond that block too. John also hosts and guests on tons of other shows too, and as you will hear, Kat and John are both perfect guests for this podcast. Also,

I've gathered all of our zip codes and used internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Catawba, Eno, and Shikori peoples. Acknowledge Kat recorded this on the traditional land of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabeg, Mississauga, and Wendat peoples. Acknowledge John recorded this on the traditional land of the Coast Salish, Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, and acknowledge that in all of our locations, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode. And today's episode is about ampersands, also known as the and sign. Straightforward topic. We had a blast exploring it. Please sit back or contort your body into an ampersand shape

because you are impressively flexible. Either way, here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with Kat Angus and John Cullen. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then cat john it is so good to have you here and i always start by asking guests their relationship to the topic or opinion of it either of you can start but how do you feel about ampersands i love them i think they're so cool looking right away i love it yes absolutely when i was younger you know when there's like a gap

when you're younger when like you know something is a thing but you don't know what it's called uh yeah so i would always call it the and snake and then when i started taking musical uh music lessons i ended up like calling it the treble clef and my i started taking musical uh music lessons i ended up like calling it the treble clef and my parents had no idea what i was talking about uh and like i went through that phase of like trying to make my handwriting really cool like some people do like hearts over the eyes and i was just doing ampersands every time and my team my like grade three teacher was like you have to write the word and you can't just keep doing this yeah I would say that uh I I had a similar experience as well I

mean I wouldn't say I'm like Kat feels like she's very excited about the ampersand so I would like to just be clear I'm like a moderate level of excited I'm not like oh my god yeah uh but no i'm the same i was the same as cat i think um part of it was like being uh in the gifted program probably uh you know it's just you're very stupid and so it felt like for some it's very funny like it felt like the ampersand was like elevated like it was like oh could i because i feel like i it was like a foreign symbol to me but then as soon as i sort of learned how to like draw it out it was like oh could i because i feel like i it was like a foreign symbol to me but then as soon as i sort of learned how to like draw it out it was like oh it's actually not that hard to draw once you so it's kind of like a cursive l almost it's like not that hard to do so i feel like once

i learned how to do it i was similar to cat where i started doing it all the time but i think it was because i thought that it was like impressive when it's not really, it's just like a shortcut, but I feel like I was like, oh yeah, this is so cool. You know, I do this. They show this up first in the wheel of fortune puzzles. I'm so cool now. And I'm a big fan of like punctuation that like combines two things like this combines sort of the e and the t for et and then i'm also a big fan of the interrobang so like any punctuation

that just mashes two things together i'm a big fan of yeah that's cool that i until researching this i did not know that it's an e and a t put together i don't know if you knew that john but i had no idea until looking no no no do not i mean please do not expect me to know anything about the history of the ampersand like already i'm intimidated cat's like well it's a combination of an e and a t i'm like okay all right uh i was just like here i am i'm like it looks like a cursive l and cat's like actually it's a unity which is great that's what we need on this podcast because i'm when i told my friends i was going to be on about punctuation they were like well that's perfect

oh cool yeah i think because i think i i remember learning it as the and sign and then i think feel like i have a memory of learning the name ampersand and being like, no, that's too fancy. I like it. I don't want to call it that. Forget it. And it already has the word and in there. You're just adding some extra letters at first. It's so long.

Yeah. I don't have time for that. Ampersand. Get out of here. I think I was the opposite. I was like, oh, most of my classmates and stuff won't know that it's called the ampersand, but I know. So like, ha ha, you know, like, oh, are you going to, are you going to, do you use ampersands in your writing? And they're like, what are you talking about? I'm like, it's the

and sign. All the kids at school might hate me, but that's just because I'm too good for them. Because I know the word ampersand. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly right. Right. I keep telling my peers I'm too good for them, and they're all mad about it for some reason. I don't know why. Of course these pores don't get me. Yeah. It seems like you guys picked up the vibe immediately, so that's good.

I'm glad you understand. We all understand each other. It's seeing a little bit of myself in you john yeah thank you hey i'm not afraid to say it low self-esteem but an unearned self of right self-righteousness yeah that's basically that's basically the gifted slogan right there that's pretty much what it is yeah they tell me I'm smart and that's all I have going for me. And still to this day, that's about it. Yep.

And I'm way dumber now. I think I was smarter as a kid and now I'm actually dumb. I'm like 36 and I'm dumb now. And I'm still like, ah, but there was the, those sweet four years where I went to a different school. I should say I was in the gifted program and in grade school it started out as like the same school but for part of one day a week you go to a different room with just the gifted kids and it was great because it was more exciting activities and then also more exciting computer games really the computer games in their lab amazing really

really good like zoom beanies get out of here really nice yeah we um i so i live in vancouver now and that is what in vancouver it's exactly that it's like if you're gifted or whatever they just yeah it's like one day a week or half a day a week and they take you out of your regular school but i grew up in ontario and i actually went to like a magnet school for it so it was just like a regular it was a regular public school in the district, but they had the gifted program housed in the school. So I actually like took a short bus every day and went to, I was stupid because I could walk to my elementary,

like my parents, we lived like a three minute walk from my elementary school, like one block away from my elementary school. And I had to take a bus an hour each way every day to go to this. Yeah. To go to the gift. John, are you me? Cause that is exactly what happened. Yeah. In Ontario we, I, yeah, I took like, I was in the gifted program. So every class I took was, was in the gifted part of it. Uh, and I had left French immersion to take gifted and now I don't know French very well anymore. And I'm like, I should have just stayed in French immersion.

Yeah, that was a bad trade that you made. Absolutely it was. Yeah, for sure. Nobody on job postings are like, must be fluent in the gifted program in 1995. That's a great point. Yeah, I guess you can't even really put that on your resume. There's no way of being like, yeah, no one cares at all. It would be great if in like Montreal and Paris and stuff,

they gave a hero's welcome to English speaking gifted students. I would love that. Like a parade through the arch in Paris. Well, it's very nice to have you here. Come on in. Thank you for your sacrifice. is, you know, well, it's very nice to have you here. Come on in. Thank you for your sacrifice. And yeah, and the ampersand, it is amazing. I really didn't know it's an ENT. I just thought it was a special and sign that I knew about. But we'll get into why that is and so much more.

Love it. Because on every episode, our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that's in a segment called, Hey, I just met you. And this is crazy. So here's some numbers. Statistic call me, maybe. And that name was submitted by at PeaceOuch3 on Twitter. Thank you, at PeaceOuch3.

We have a new name for this every week. Please make them as silly and wacky and bad as possible. Submit to SifPod on Twitter or to SifPod at gmail.com. That's awesome. That was a good one. I feel like they just wanted you to sing. Do you sing it normally? Is it normally like a sing thing?

Pretty frequently, yeah. Okay, I was going to say, it felt like you were really... The name, I'll be honest, it wasn't like the best combination of words. So I was like, you know what? I think they just want Alex to sing. That felt like what they were really going for. I love the combination of words. Thought it was fantastic.

Okay, some debate here. Great. Yeah, we've wiped out a lot of the world's songs so far. So they're pulling what they can, I think. Yeah. And it's a couple numbers here about the ampersand, and the first one is just about the English language. It is fifth, and fifth is the ranking of the word and

in Oxford Dictionary's ranking of the most commonly used words in the English language. And it's unclear to me from how they wrote it up if ampersand counts for and, but in case people are curious, in 2011, they analyzed the Oxford English corpus of all the texts they can find that have ever been written. And and came in fifth behind the words of, to, be. And then the number one word is the. It's all the tiny words.

Can never overcome the champion. Yeah, I would have thought and was higher. Yeah, exactly. I would have thought and was higher than fifth. I would have put and above some of those ones you just said in my mind. Right. Of seems strange to me as number four. Yes, I agree.

Maybe it's like a holdover from the from night times. John Cullen of Vancouver, Sir Cullen, you know, where it's all the history books are just spamming the word of and screwing us all over. I feel like the word of is just a word like you don't notice at all. And it's like it just sneaks right in there. Yeah. If I try to think of how it's used i think of european nobles which is not a thing that comes up a lot yeah how is that the main touchstone that's so weird i guess i said i think of european nobles now i'm way in my head about everything there you go there you go yeah

now every time you say of for the next like 48 hours you're gonna be like you know what i do use it a lot john was wrong we should we're in it's a great word but yeah so and there's tons of opportunities to use an ampersand because it's the the fifth most common word in the whole language next number here i i had never like thought about this phenomenon but the next number is 2001 and 2001 is the year of the premiere of the first ampersand shirt like the one where it's a list of names and it's an ampersand after each one i i just saw those on people all of a sudden and it turns out in 2001 that was the first time those came out what was did we know i was just gonna ask that yeah yeah Yeah, it was a Dutch shirt design shop

called Experimental Jet Set. And they were trying to think of a way to do a Beatles shirt. I was going to guess Beatles. The Beatles was going to be my first guess, actually. So that makes sense. John and Paul and George and Ringo, you know. Cool. Exactly, yeah.

And also the order was actually John ampersand Paul ampersand Ringo ampersand George. And apparently the sources are fuzzy. That's some controversial ordering right there. Yeah, I feel like putting Ringo last felt like the thing I was most sure about. Right. So it turns out it's like a graphic design how the letters line up choice because

originally the shirt was just going to be their four names and then they felt like george's name is way too long and so they put george at the bottom and stuck ampersands on the other three to like make the lines more even i was wondering if it was kind of like a similar thing to how in a tv credit somebody special gets the and oh credit at the end of it and george is like i get the and credit right at the end they're like we all get the and credit relax like when like when a famous actor is a side character and then they're the last one yeah exactly yeah yeah exactly yeah like with ellen burston or whoever and then somebody else and alec baldwin or something like that yeah that's the other we

won't really spend time on it but there's i think like hollywood people know that there's the system where if there's an ampersand between two writers names that means they're an actual team and if it's the word and it just means they like we're both involved but separately there's a lot of ands and ampersands going on in credits in a big way cool i never knew that before yeah if it's name ampersand name they're like a team like they spent the whole time together and sometimes they split pay you know like they only get one writer's pay uh but if it's the word and that's how that works. If you're a team, you have to split one salary. I think in TV.

I'll double check that. I'll cut this. But yeah, it's it's pretty aggressive. It's like we can hire either this one person or this ampersand. That's how they'll talk about it. Oh, that's see. And then that seems like if you're a writer, you you messed up. You got to pretend you got to have like a pretend fight.

Yeah, we work together for the first five years of our career. But now we are strictly not an ampersand. But like, wink, wink. So you'll have to pay both of us a full salary. Exactly. We certainly won't work together anymore. Oh, definitely not. We I hate him.

Curse his wife or whatever you say. I want to make him feel bad. I hate him. Curse his wife. Or whatever you say. I want to make him feel bad. Yeah, exactly. These are tremendous clean fights, and I'm really enjoying it. Thank you. Curse his wife, indeed. But then the last number here, and this is sort of another trend thing. It's not really a stat stat but the last number is 56 and 56 is the number of different examples in one article of like ampersand based fashion brand

names oh this was a an article in 2016 and they were say they were writing about a like trend especially in the 2010s where fancy companies and fashion companies they just pick a name where it's name ampersand name and it's kind of random words and this this author rebecca jennings at rack.com listed 56 different examples at that time with links to shop including stella and bow sky and staghorn l Larkspur and Hawk, Zadig and Voltaire. They're all, I won't list them all. They're all just like thing ampersand thing to seem fancy. I mean, I'm not going to lie.

I would fall for it. Just one of you. I'm not buying anything from you. Oh, you got a friend? Here's all my money. Yeah. Your friend's name is Larkspur? Cool. Voltaire? Voltaire. You must read. Yeah. Great. got a friend here's all my money yeah your friend's name is larkspur cool right voltaire

voltaire yeah exactly i did i think i purchased something from bull lamp or sand branch one time like there's a bunch of these it's a it's a thing that we'll also link a vox.com interview with somebody named rachel bernard who is a professional brand name creator. And in 2019, she said that she had strong negative feelings about, quote, that faux heritage, random word ampersand, random word style of name. I hardly see any of that anymore. Thank goodness. End quote. Wow.

It's just a low key thing in Internet shopping going on for the past decade. Yeah, I'll say that was like that felt like a like oh that that that felt like a direct attack on the brand manager who like came up with that like she's still a little bit frosty that she wasn't the one who came up with name ampersand name like oh thank god that trend is over i mean that would are you kidding me with this you know it was like a real Backstreet Boys NSYNC kind of, thank God the boy band era is over. No one liked that anyway.

Yeah. Says the person who manages singer songwriters. And then one and direction shows up. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's true. I feel like we'll keep seeing name, name for stand, name for companies all over the lake. Oh, it'll make a comeback.

It'll cut it. Even if it's gone, it's coming back. Yeah, it does. keep seeing name and for stand name for companies all over the lake oh it'll make a comeback it'll cut it even if it's gone it's coming back yeah it does it does have that feel of like it just feels natural in some way like i i don't know why uh but it yeah i i agree with the sort of feeling like kat was saying it just you know there's something about it that is that is rewarding or or makes you feel like it's more credible even though that doesn't it doesn't mean anything often yeah like there's two of them they must be tolerable to be around yeah right they must be nice they've got a friend they like each other and respect each other enough to go into business together yeah and. And we don't, we don't,

we're not privy to how hard they fought over who was going first in the name situation. So we don't, we just assume it was very agreeable and everyone was happy. But then once they came up with the name, the friendship fell apart behind the scenes. Things are bad. Yeah, very bad.

Well, I'm just second in the name. You do it all the time. Just constantly. Listen, someone else wanted to be first, so. Get to work, Larkspur. Yeah. Well, and those are the stats and numbers. Now there's three big takeaways about the ampersand, especially the history of it.

Going into takeaway number one. The ampersand symbol is the Latin word for and. And this is a pretty brief part of the show, but that letter E and letter T, that is Latin for and. That's where it comes from. I think that's one of the, that might be the only thing i retained from grade nine latin class so oh you took latin wow uh that is all i have retained it

was a very boring class that's wild i i didn't know any i didn't know that i mean i think i knew the latin word for and was et but i didn't know again like i said this is new knowledge to me that this is an e and a t together so I'm seeing it now I'm looking at the pictures you sent us and now I'm like oh it is an e and a t yeah it turns out like there with a lot of fonts there's a regular version and an italic version and not just italics where it tilts but where it's actually kind of different and so we'll have pictures linked for people if you look at the like special italic version of a lot of fonts the ampersand tends to be a pretty clear like letter e running into a

letter t yeah because i i think of it as like the traditional sort of like it doesn't look like an e and a t really uh because it's got the line that the diagonal line that sort of runs through the whole thing but now but yeah it looks like a curled up snake yeah exactly the ampersand snake yes but but yes like seeing this one especially that you sent with the like eight pictures of the different ampersands i'm like god it feels like when you find out there's a an arrow in the fedex logo oh yeah but like but like an actual smart version of it where you're like oh my god this is so crazy they do get real fancy with these t's and some of these yes i know i know

relax we get it it's a t yeah apparently i'm i'm not a big like typography person but apparently font designers and typography designers like they'll do all their letters. And then it's like, my magnum opus is the, the ampersand of this font. Like, this is what I really, this is what they'll remember me for that.

This bit. I mean, I want to laugh at them, but if I did typography, I'd be all in on that. Absolutely. Yeah. These,

this is where I, my creative juices finally get flowing. That's what people will be hacking on you about. Like other typographers will be like, I mean, Kat Ang, when's she going to start thinking about the letters? Am I right? Yeah, sure. She can do a great question mark, but look at those B's and D's.

Horrific. Some of us use words for a living, right? Come on. Yeah, exactly. some of us use words for a living right come on yeah exactly i won't stop until it's all punctuation marks that's wingdings isn't it isn't wingdings basically that's like the equivalent of all punctuation marks i feel like wingdings is like clip art well it's like faces and stuff yeah but i just feel like that's sort of the equivalent of like oh we gotta learn what all of these symbols mean i mean that's just learning to read yeah yeah but a different language where

the language is emojis that's the dream john yeah someday this background of it got a couple sources here one of them is a book about fonts it's called just my type by simon garfield also the smithsonian archives and then a piece from fast company but the the latin word at which is spelled et like like that phrase at to brute like and you brutus you know just et that that is the E-T, like that phrase et tu, Brute, like and you, Brutus, you know. Just E-T, that is the Latin word for and. And so we don't know who drew like the first ampersand. We just know that over time, people writing in Latin started running their E together with their T. And eventually it became what's called a ligature, which is combining multiple letters into one symbol.

Love it. Cool, cool. Hey, sorry, you said it's a E-T ampersand, phone home. All right, guys, this has been really fun. See you guys later. It's been a great time. Thanks, Alex. Thanks, everyone, for listening.

We'll see you guys later. We got to go out on top. John, come back from that bicycle flying past the moon get down here okay all right i'm back okay i'm back i'm back yeah and uh we'll also we'll have a picture linked of it's like somebody's tracing of it but the earliest ampersand we know of is from graffiti at Pompeii because they preserved all that. And somebody wrote what looks like an E.T. running together with one line in on the wall there. So it's from 79 A.D. or earlier because that's when Pompeii was destroyed. Do we know what like it was it

just the ampersand in the graffiti or were there words around it where they were saying like, I had sex with your mom and your dad and that's where the ampersand was yeah all the sources i have kind of cut that off i don't know what the context was i wish i knew yeah maybe it is embarrassing like that release the pompeii cut everybody that was their big gang that was their gang tag or whatever they're like they just wrote and on everything. They're like, what? The Larkspur and Hawks, their cool, tough gang in Rome.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, it is a cool looking, I mean, you would never see this and mistake it for a modern ampersand. Like if you showed me that picture and you were like, what punctuation mark is that resembling? We'd be here for a long time. I wouldn't be able to think of it, but it does look,

but it all, but it also looks cool though. Like it's got a cool, it's got a cool vibe to it, you know? Yeah. If you hadn't told me this was an ampersand, I'd be like,

is this like a cave painting? Is this like, it did, did the, like, did the Vikings think this represented a horse? Yeah, it kind of looks like a dog with a long tail. Yes. Yes. So a ligature is when you form a glyph by combining multiple letters.

And a glyph is any letter or number or any like elemental writing symbol. And then the Smithsonian says an ampersand is also a logogram, because a logogram is one character that represents an entire word. And other examples are the equal sign for the word equals and plus sign for the word plus and dollar sign for a dollar. You know, there's a bunch of these. I love punctuation trivia. That's really cool. Yeah, it's just kind of what's going on with it. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know if I have a comment. I don't have a comment. I'm just like, yeah, good. These are good facts. Keep them coming. Yeah, that's right. Keep them coming, baby. And then it's an extra thing,

but there's an article by Kurt Kolstad who wrote it for the website for 99% Invisible. And he wrote about at one point there was an internet push to create the Andor sand, which is an ampersand with like a lowercase r coming off of it because it means and or, you know? No, no. Oh, I hate it. I hate it. I don't care for that. Nope. I hate it. I don't care for that. Nope.

I hate it. I mean, I hate it. And I'll tell you why. Here's two reasons. First of all, stupid name. The only reason you know this guy thought of it is because he's like, whoa, this is kind of a cute portmanteau. No, s**ks hate it.

Number two, one of the joys is writing and or. You can make some really great jokes slash inclusions and exclusions by doing the and or thing. So I don't care. I don't want a whole symbol that someone has to figure out. We don't. No, we don't. And you also just don't write it enough where it would be justifiable to have. You know, all the numbers are full.

What are we going to do? Get rid of the circumflex on the six? No chance. It's already in there it's hard enough to draw an ampersand somehow fitting an r in there would make me furious exactly have some respect for cat and i in grade three trying to draw ampersands yeah i think i just drew it as like a backwards cursive s all the time yeah that's close enough i think we all spent too much time making that like s out of the

six lines that you connect the points to oh yes elementary school not enough time on the ampersands man yeah that and i remember like being a kid in school and thinking okay whatever stussy is and whatever 311 is these are very important to our culture i need to learn these things they're carved into every desk need to find out yeah you should do a a sif episode on on just that s it's like while it was believed jack morrow was the first person to draw that on his pencil case in 1994 in akron ohio right but i should just invent all of it no research no just tall tales exactly yeah the other kids thought hey that's pretty cool you know this fact-based podcast that i do that you love now i'm gonna lie to you maybe i've been lying the whole time once you win at jeopardy you at Jeopardy, you can tell people anything. It's true. No rules. It's great.

Next thing here is a big trumpet sound for a big takeaway. Before that, we're going to take a little break. We'll be right back. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places. Yes, I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year.

Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience, one you have no choice but to embrace, because, yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. From here, we can get into the second takeaway. Takeaway number two.

From here, we can get into the second takeaway. Takeaway number two. There is a secret second version of the ampersand, and it pops up in a few surprising places. While they were creating the ampersand, and our main source here is a great book called Shady Characters by Keith Houston, which is all about punctuation and symbols. But there's a whole second version also from ancient Rome, and it competed with the ampersand as that evolved. It was the Betamax of the ampersand signs? Like a little, yeah.

Like it came a little before it maybe, and yeah, it was just a different system. And many people would say it was vastly superior, but ultimately the ampersand. I don't know. So RCA has done a superior, but ultimately the ampersand. I don't know. RCA has done a pretty sweet version of the ampersand, but I'd greatly prefer this Sony Betamax version. I'm looking forward to the Laserdisc version of the ampersand. Oh, yeah.

That one. That's the Andorsand. The Andorsand is Laserdisc. No one asked for it. It's too big and clunky. And it only lasted like a year. I wonder if those old media formats are memorable to super young kids. I had a super memorable experience where I went to a new friend's basement when I was in high school. And their dad had gone all in on Laserdisc.

dad had gone all in on laser disc and so they had like a custom wooden shelf like showing off all of their laser discs blockbuster shelf style with all the covers out and everything and i had fully never heard of that medium when i when i got down there it was a total shock to me i have like a very specific memory of my elementary school getting a laser disc machine whoa and and this was like the like we our class went to the library specifically just to watch a laser disc because it was like it was the only machine in the school the librarian wouldn't let it leave the library so this was like her like pride and joy i don't know how much money she spent on this thing but it was like yeah we got called down to the library just specifically to watch like a laser disc and it was just like this is the future and i mean to be fair a laser disc itself looks

incredible like it's the size of a record but looks like a cd so when you're a kid i mean it's the size of your head but it's like got that kind of shiny sort of prismy type thing like a cd has and so you're like this is of, of course, this is the future. This looks like the future. This is incredible. And then, yeah. It has a whole movie on it, or most of one. It has a whole movie, yeah.

And then I never thought of it again. I think that's the only time in my life I've seen or been around a LaserDisc. I think even in my own school, I never watched a laser disc again. Right. What if the gifted school had like better media, you know, like, oh, laser discs are for them.

Forget it. I wish. It was at my original non-gifted school. Like I think it was when I was in grade three and then in grade four, I moved to the gifted school. So yeah, you're right. The gifted school was like, we can see the future for lasererdiscs, and it is not bright.

And yeah, there's this second model of an ampersand. And so it comes from the Romans, but it comes from the shorthand by one guy, and his name was Tiro, T-I-R-O. And we don't know precisely when he was born, but we know he was born into slavery in ancient Rome, and he was specifically born as a slave in the household of the Cicero family. And then from there, he proceeded to be the personal secretary of Marcus Tullius Cicero, who's one of the most famous statesmen writers, philosophers in ancient Rome. And then Tiro became his secretary, and he invented a massive system of shorthand for writing down Cicero's words. And so then

everyone was super excited about how Tiro did his shorthand because that was how you got Cicero. And he had his own version of like an and sign. He did his own thing. That is very cool. Like, like you're not important, but you're so close to it that you get to sort of change how the language works. Yeah. Yeah.

It was like you, you just wrote down such an important guy's words that we're going to use some of the ways you did it. That was his situation. I imagine that it got very big for like a couple months. And then someone just walked in and they were like, dude, that's a seven. Yeah. Sorry, man. Sorry, man.

You just did a seven. I mean, I know you think this means and, but this is a seven, bro. I'm sorry, man. But we're not. We're never going to use this again. It's a seven. We already have the numbers. And is a seven, bro. I'm sorry, man, but we're not, we're never going to use this again. It's a seven. We already have the numbers and it looks exactly like this. I'm sorry.

This is a joke that people who are listening to this are not going to get it at all until they see the source image. But please know that it absolutely is a seven. We'll have a picture and people almost don't need to see it. His symbol was just a line to the right and then down. And that was and for him was basically a seven shape. Yeah. Yeah.

But yeah, I mean, he was writing what he was what the guy was saying. He wasn't counting. He's like, what's a seven? True. True. He's like, well, this is a this is a letter. I think you can tell by context this is a logogram or whatever we're calling it. Yeah. You know, this is a logogram or whatever we're calling it. Yeah.

You know, this is a logogram. It's very clearly I'm not, you know, he didn't say I went to my mom's seven dad's house. You know that. Use the context clues. You know, Tiro is like, that is what I said, actually. Yeah. I had seven. I had seven dads.

Yeah. The Romans got wild. You know, that's what they did. I mean, I believe it. You could tell me anything if you're like, yeah, most people had one mom and seven dads. I'd be like, sure. Okay. Makes sense to me. And plus, I feel like it would have really hit him like a truck if he had been around for Arabic numerals coming in and then they start having sevens you know like no that's my aunt oh geez I used it so much it's in so much of my stuff oh no it's all unreadable now yeah he's like and all like everything was just a not like his the just looked like a nine. And all the most popular words just looked like Arabic numerals. It's actually, a lot of people for a long time thought Tiro was a mathematician.

We didn't really understand that he was writing language. Mathematician who's terrible at addition to any other form of mathematics. Yeah, exactly. Or they thought Cicero was a cool robot. Like it just kept spitting out these numbers. He wrote them down. I don't know. That's what we got.

Not even in binary, just numbers. Yeah, so many numbers. Yeah, he was way ahead of his time. Oh, your robot only makes zeros and ones. Check out my Ciceronian robot back here. Cicero-bot. Yeah, there we go. Cicero-bot.

And a little bit about Cicero for people. I feel like his words are uniquely used and reused in at least Europe and then in the Americas a lot. used and reused in at least like europe and then in the americas a lot that he lived 106 bc to 43 bc but his his like speeches and writings and stuff they were they were passed down so much over history that even that lorem ipsum filler text that people use in powerpoint digital printing and stuff that's just lifted from some of cicero's writing he, that's him writing about the nature of good and evil. But we use it because it's like, well, this is the most important writer if you're obsessed with the classics. Like this is the guy.

So he's still endured. He's not feeling bad about his little seven. Yeah, Cicero's doing good. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, for being like 2000 years old, he's there. Yeah, it's going all right. And so this guy Tiro, and I don't know if anyone like does something similar even in the modern day, but it's this thing where Cicero is a

statesman, he becomes the consul of Rome at one point. And so he's giving a lot of speeches. And Tiro attends the speech and writes it down. And in order to write it down fast, he worked out thousands of different shorthand symbols. There were symbols for words, there were symbols for entire phrases, there were symbols for entire sentences that are common. And so he just used this to rapidly note down whatever Cicero said, and then other people kept using his system. Keith Houston says that at one point there was a medieval update of Tiro's system that contained about 14,000 different glyphs. So he's this impossible shorthand robot of a person who did every word he could. The concept of shorthand, I don't get it.

I understand that it's a thing you have to learn. It just seems like magic to me. You can write at the same speed that people are talking and you know what it says? No. I think you're just making it up. And his writing instruments, I assume, were bad. I can't write fast with a good pen. And he has some kind of quill or chisel or something.

It seems impossible. you know some kind of quill or chisel or something it seems i mean presumably he wasn't shorthanding on stone but that would be truly amazing that rule cicero's talking and you just hear like can you start again i've missed everything since the first word tiro keep it down yeah and then one of his main symbols was this like line to the right and then down to mean at to mean and it became one of the main symbols from his shorthand that other people used it became called the tyronian at which is very fancy and so you see it in a lot of like medieval european texts and stuff and it really only starts to go away once people are doing block printing because they don't do whole separate blocks for like tiro shorthand characters they moved on from that printing press ruins it for everybody once again thanks so much gutenberg you know tiro's estate is just furious they've been just coasting on the et for

1500 years and then oh gutenberg comes along and he's just took away all our money the tyronian family is now tyronian et is is flash and the printing press is the iphone that refute that is no longer going to support Flash. Yeah, basically. Yeah, yeah. And then there are like two weird cases, only one of them for sure, where the Tyroneanette still pops up. And one of them is the Irish Gaelic language. it's i might my sources weren't super clear on why but keith houston has pictures of like mailboxes and bilingual road signs in ireland that have like the mailbox was like parcels tyronean at letters like those they still just use that i think because it has some medieval

roots as a language so one place they still write it cool yeah i like that i like i like when people hang on to something like that yeah and it totally works like it's easier to draw than an ampersand and i think right so easier yeah yeah and then the other way this is probably just more of a weird coincidence but computer keyboards kind of have it because there's a spot that most modern keyboards have an ampersand on. And a lot of times that's the same as the number seven. Right. Oh, shit. Yeah.

I just looked down at my keyboard and my mind exploded. Right. And Keith Houston and others say that if you look back at past computers and past typewriters, sometimes it's with the seven, sometimes it's with the six, sometimes the ampersand somewhere else. But like, there's no evidence anybody ever said these should be in the same spot because a seven is kind of a Toronianette. But on my keyboard and a lot of people's keyboards, it's the same key. It's amazing. I'm just imagining that meme of Charlie from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia philadelphia with all like the conspiracy board it's one of those yeah yeah i i was picturing the zach galifianakis meme with all the numbers around my head whoa they're the same key yeah but yes that's a little surprise to, you know, spice up people's keyboards. Very fun. Love it.

And that takes us into the last takeaway of the main show. Takeaway number three. The name Ampersand came from lazy 1800s students. I need more information. I'm so curious. Seems way too long to be lazy. Hey, here's this lazy word. It's nine letters long.

I don't even know if it's that many. It's three syllables, whereas and is one. Yeah, this is horrible. I think that's why it always felt fancy to me, because it feels like way more of a flourish to say that than to just say it. And I think, too, like I said earlier, I think part of it is

also like you learn what it is at different times. So it's like, you feel really smart because you're like, I know it's not just called the and sign. I know it's called the ampersand. So I think that's part of it too. That gives it, like you say, it gives it this sort of, this sort of fanciness because it's a word you learn at sort of it's not an important word to know so it's like some people will learn it earlier just by virtue of whatever and then they're like i'm smart because i know it's called an ampersand and not an and sign it feels like you have a dangerous secret yeah totally yeah like you and your book have a have a thing and nobody else knows yeah exactly well and uh and yeah this comes from like the history of how ampersands were taught i feel like

i was trying to remember i feel like even in grade school and stuff our teachers never really spent time on it they were like it's the n sign. Great. But according to Mental Floss, for one thing, ampersand first appeared in an English language dictionary in 1837, like the word ampersand. And it's because starting in the 1700s in Britain and later in the US, there started to be more schools, more primers and basic courses and teaching stuff like arithmetic and the alphabet they in the 1700s started teaching ampersand as the 27th letter of the alphabet like they they gave it that prominence and categorization so it was all of a through z or a through z and then after that ampersand that was like the extra letter but it's not a letter it's a it's a weird sign yeah so i are both like in stunned silence right now like you can't do that it really messed up the

alphabet song w x y z and ampersand basically yeah that's pretty much what happened uh and it it's also like we'll link to it's an australian really well researched blog called the conversation where they they try to pin down where the alphabet song came from it's kind of unclear but it seems like before that kids would just recite the letters of the alphabet. And the system was you say all the letters, and then after X, Y, Z, you say the phrase, and per se, and. And this is more Latin, because per se means by itself. So you're saying and by itself, and, is the phrase on the end. So the and in ampersand actually does mean and?

Yes. Yeah, that's what it means. That's incredible. I don't know if I'm furious or impressed. It's just more words on top of and to say and. Yeah, that's it. Whoa. I'm not going to lie. There was a part of me that was a little skeptical that you could make the ampersand secretly incredibly fascinating, but this is wonderful.

I love this so much. Thank you. incredibly fascinating but this is wonderful i love it thank you so this so it would end and they would say and per se and and then they got tired of saying all that so then they were just like x y z ampersand yep yeah that's what happened yeah kids were like i this is i'm sick of her saying the alphabet let's just let's just cut to. We already did Z. I feel like we're done. Yeah. I feel like I've never been happier and more angry in my entire life. I mean, I think I've both been happier and more angry, but this is quite fascinating.

You don't have to point out my hyperbole here, John. It's the English teacher in me you know i just can't help but uh no it's no it's that's crazy because it does seem it does seem wild to me that you would think that that needed to be in the alphabet song like it doesn't even or alphabet whatever recital or you know like it doesn't it doesn't make any sense that you would like, why that? And not like the, I guess the doesn't have a logo. It doesn't have a, yeah. But even then you just, you like, okay. I guess my question is this, like, was it, were people just always using this symbol

for and, and like never, ever writing out and because i i feel like in now we don't really use the ampersand like you don't use it in formal writing like it's not allowed to be used in formal writing we don't really see it in journalism like it's almost exclusively used when you're describing like a pair um and like like we were talking about the writers or whatever so i get like so is it just because they didn't ever write and back then, like it was almost always done in shorthand. And so then they felt like that symbol had to be in the alphabet. From what I can tell, they wrote both like they would write and, but also they would

sort of like, I mean, it's, it's exactly like it, like when we say et cetera, or when we use another loan phrase from another language, like, like when we say etc or when we use another loan phrase from another language like like you can say etc or you can say and other stuff like that you know they're both just in play and so i think a latin style at as an ampersand was in play but nobody called it an ampersand yet jeez they should have put all all the latin stuff in the alphabet song. X, Y, Z, et al, et cetera, sick, and, you know, whatever, ampersand. Like, death to tyrants. Whoa, hey, hey, hey, chill out. Kids, I'm just a teacher, all right?

Very political all of a sudden. Yeah. Yeah, and it definitely, I'm still amazed they taught ampersand like it's a letter. Because you really can just write and. You don't have to use it that way. Yeah. That blows my mind. None of the other letters are words.

Well, I guess I is. And I. Okay. Scratch that a little bit. I don't know what I'm talking about. But those are like so boiled down i mean oh you could also make the case for oh if we're you know if we're singing a religious song or you know praise praising god yeah and v really doesn't like including the H with the word O. Yeah, exactly. Linda, and also like trying to make it a letter leads to this slang where kids, the way Keith Houston puts it, is they would just slur the final syllables.

And then once people start doing that, then it's like not a clean transition into the word ampersand. There's a bunch of different slang that people try to make out of that mumbling and out of that like laziness. And the there's a book called the 1905 Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English. And they recorded the following nicknames for this one thing. Ampersand, and pussy and, and passy and, and pasty and passy and parse a percy and passy and passy anna ampene and ampus and ampazad and percy and ampersad and zumzy zan like just all stuff people thought worked for it i mean there's some real real killers on there some really good some really good ones i'm pissed off we call it an ampersand and not an and pussy and personally uh we really dropped the ball on that one yeah we we've kind of sanitized it because the one last thing is that

the other result of ampersand being considered the last letter is that apparently as soon as the name ampersand came along that became slang for the butt because like if ampersand's at the end your butt is your end and so like immediately people were like oh yeah i'm gonna kick yourersand, you know, like stuff like that with the slang. I love that humans have just been like this all along. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's great. For sure.

For sure. For sure. Yeah. That's good. Yeah, because that almost to me, too, I'm just imagining like, to me, I went more not the kick my ampersand way, but like a classy lady using ampersand, but like, you know, in a sexual way. Like, you don't want to say, you don't want to point out any, you know, you don't want to say ass or butt.

You want to be like my ampersand. Please go gentle on my ampersand this evening. That was, yeah, exactly. please go gentle on my ampersand this evening that was yeah exactly folks that is the main episode for this week my thanks thanks to Kat Angus and John Cullen for sharing the gift of their time and their histories as my fellow gifted kids. Anyway, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly, incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show on Patreon.com, patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one

obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the mysterious origins of the at sign. You know, the at sign, the email and social media thing. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than four dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring ampersands with us. Here is one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, the ampersand symbol is the Latin word for and. Takeaway number two, there is a secret second ampersand and it pops up in surprising places. And takeaway number three, the name ampersand came from lazy 1800s students.

Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guests. They're great. Kat Angus co-hosts the podcast I Hate It But I Love It, I High By Lie, fantastic pop culture ideas and fun and so much more. Also, you can swing by katangus.substack.com for her wonderful newsletter. It's called Kat Watches

Everything. And then John Cullen co-hosts a hilarious podcast called Blocked Party. It's all about hilarious stories of getting blocked on social media and, you know, where that leads them to. Both Kat and John's podcasts are available if you just search the names in your podcast app, or you can follow the links at sifpod.fun. Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. A great article from the Smithsonian Archives website by Andrew Whitesell. A great book. It's titled Shady Characters, the Secret Life of Punctuation Symbols and Other Typographical Marks. That is by Keith Houston, and the and in that title is, of course,

an ampersand. And another great book here, too, it's titled Just My Type, a book about fonts, and that book is by Simon Garfield. Find those and many more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is unbroken, unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons. I hope you love this week's bonus show. If you love this week's bonus show,

at me about it would be very appropriate. Anyway, thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Thank you.