Friday, August 15, 2008
The Ampersand
Daring Fireball hipped me to the newish scene at The Ampersand, celebrating the & in all its manifestations.
As characters go, the curvy ampersand has the most sex appeal, popping up on t-shirt logos and anywhere there’s design for the sake of pretty.
To my knowledge, this is the only typographic symbol to get placed in the hip realm of floral silhouettes, forest animals, and photo-realistic wood grain.
A Simple Bits article (via The Ampersand) details the ways they’ve made use of the character with clever CSS.
It really does seem to belong in the land of the visual, since it doesn’t say “and” in a uniquely meaningful way. I’ve often wondered how the exactly the word and symbol were formed, beyond the Latin “et al.”
The Online Etymology Dictionary tells us that this ligature goes back to Pompeiian graffiti, medieval scribes and Anglo-Saxon chroniclers. Hot! So this ribbonesque symbol was drawn by hand, explaining why it wasn’t, um, always hip to be a square block in a typesetter’s case.
I could never draw a nice one by hand, because I’m a really bad draw-er. Mine tend to look like fancy S’s or lazy plus signs. But I like the beat of the word’s rhythm. It totally goes with remembering its hexadecimal and pound thirty-eight which is what I hear in my head when I type the code for & (the semicolon is silent, like an e).
In other news, that’s my third Pompeii hit this week. The first was when the Times reported (as many have for about ten years) that the ruins of Pompeii are in a dangerous state of emergency. A couple days ago, I learned from the genius author and amazing musician Mike Edison that many, many of the meaningful symbols all over that ancient city were depictions of sexy parts (peniseses and ballz and things oh my!) guiding the path to brothels. When the Victorian archeologists came across these, just like the naughty filthy dirty (to their eyes) Greek art, they hid most of it away and sanitized their findings for the masses.
Now I’m learning the history of Graffiti and Pompeii on Answers.com. The article makes it sound like only very G-rated images were used to indicate “Pay to play this-a-way.”
“The graffiti shows a handprint that vaguely resembles a heart, along with a footprint and a number. This is believed to indicate that a brothel was nearby, with the handprint symbolizing payment.”
Somehow I feel that if an article were on Wikipedia, and the authors knew their stuff, there’d be some ... ah ha! yes. Here we are: Erotic art in Pompeii and Herculaneum.
hmm.
Erotic Art in Pompeii & Herculaneum
nice.
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