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Comment by kgwgk | Hacker News Reader

Wrong title.

    Ampersand was once “and per se and” & was …

should be

    Ampersand was once “and per se” and & was …

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No, title is correct, the name of the letter was pronounced “and per se and”, which slurred into the modern “ampersand”, and since “Ampersand” is the subject of the first clause of the sentence and the second clause is a dependent clause connected by a conjunction, not an independent clause joined by a comma and a conjunction, the subject doesn’t need repeated: the “&” is just the conjunction “and” not a repetition of the subject “ampersand”.

Yes, they’re being overclever “&” earning an eyeroll from me (& everyone who expects headlines to be clear and easily parseable.

Ok, I stand corrected.

But saying that the name of the character “&” was pronounced “and per se and” is like saying that the name of the character “Z” is pronounced “and zee” or “and zed”.

How is it like saying "and zee"? The article pretty clearly outlines the logic here, and this would not be like that. If anything, it'd be "zee per se zee".

Because the alphabet was “a, b, …, x, y, z and &” (pronounced “… why zed and per se and”) and now it’s “a, b, …, x, y and z” (pronounced “… why and zed”).

You're missing that "& per se &" would still have been called that even if it wasn't the last item in the list. If the order was "...y, & and z" you'd pronounce it "why and per se and and zed".

Is there any reason to believe so?

Maybe it’s you who is missing what’s going on.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-origin-of-the-ampersand

& was named ampersand in the context of rattling off the letters of the alphabet in English: “double-you ex wye izzard/zed, and”.

“… And what?”

“And, on its own, and” (and, per se, and).

With “and” named in English, because this was an English rattling off of the alphabet.

> Is there any reason to believe so?

Yes, specificially this article: http://haggardhawksblog.blogspot.com/2015/03/ampersand.html

I agree with palotasb about that article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35611618

No it isn't. The first "and" in "and per se and" isn't a conjunction. So you could actually say:

I per se I, O per se O, and and per se and.

One could say whatever one wants but I think that in this case it’s actually a conjunction and I doubt anybody has ever said “I per se I” (Edited to add: actually that makes sense - for the letter i - but in a different context: spelling and not alphabet recitation. “c, a, r : car”, “i : I”. _letter_ (per se) : _word_)

https://www.englishclub.com/efl/podcasts/interesting-facts/a...

At the end of the alphabet, students would say “X,Y,Z and, per se, & (and)”.

Re "I doubt anybody has ever said I per se I" (in the context of alphabet recitation) may I draw your attention to this article[0]:

> Up until as recently as the mid 1900s, it was standard practice when reciting the alphabet to use the Latin phrase per se (literally “by itself”) to differentiate between individual letters of the alphabet—like A, I, and O—and single-character homographic words—like a, I and O.

> So the letter A would be read as “A per se A”, to ensure it was distinguished from the indefinite article a. The letter I, similarly, would be “I per se I” to differentiate it from the pronoun I. And the letter O would be “O per se O” to differentiate it from the interjection O!

[0] http://haggardhawksblog.blogspot.com/2015/03/ampersand.html

Thank for the link but that seems misleading or just wrong. “A per se A” means

    “a” (per se = by itself = as a letter) [spells the word] “a”

Nobody would recite the alphabet as

    a per se a, bee, …, aitch, i per se i, jay, …

and ending with

    … zee and per se and

means

    … zee and “&”

It was not, at claimed there,

    Y, Z, and & per se &

In that case the modern name would be _andampersand_!

According to the article, the former title is correct. The term was in fact "and per se and".

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