Free Republic

Joe Biden is very unpopular. He's not doing well in polls, and he isn't doing well campaigning. So, how can he possibly whip up any interest in his flagging campaign? He's just pulled out something that he's tried before: the highly questionable "letter" from a child. Previously, he (or the person posting from his X social media account) posted a letter that many thought was fake. In March 2023, Biden got a similar letter from "Charlotte" (another age-contemporary name with Joe) supposedly asking Biden to do something about pay for "ladies" not being "fair." Uh-huh, because that's what a little...

As with a lot of aspects of typography, the history of the ampersand begins with our triumphant and progressive friends, the Ancient Romans. Roman scribes would write in cursive so as to increase the speed of their transcription, often combining letters into one form to save time while also increasing legibility, where certain characters overlap in a visually discordant manner — this was the birth of the ligature. The ampersand is simply a ligature of the letters E and T (et being the latin word for and). [...] The Etymology Before deconstructing the word ampersand, you must first understand another latin legacy...

Johnson & Johnson, Barnes & Noble, Dolce & Gabbana: the ampersand today is used primarily in business names, but that small character was once the 27th part of the alphabet. Where did it come from though? The origin of its name is almost as bizarre as the name itself. The shape of the character (&) predates the word ampersand by more than 1,500 years. In the first century, Roman scribes wrote in cursive, so when they wrote the Latin word et which means “and” they linked the e and t. Over time the combined letters came to signify the word...