Tattoo Tuesday {17} Et Per Se And

Do you have a literary tattoo? I’d love to feature it!

Just send me an email with a picture and story behind it.

Blogs Participating in Tattoo Tuesday:

Padfoot & Prongs @ Good Books Inc

I’m being narcissistic again this week and featuring some of my tattoos I already posted about my JLS inspired birds and now I’m sharing my punctuation nerdiness! I’ll start with the tattoos and then share some info on why I got them and where the ampersand came from.

First up, my semi-colon tattoo!

(it is a little lighter now that it is healed)

and here is my new ampersand tattoo!

… closer up …

(still a little shiny)

… and what you see when my arm is at my side

So why a semi-colon and an ampersand?!

I feel that they represent my love of reading and writing. I also find them aesthetically pleasing. For me the semi-colon reminds me of the ability to put two separate ideas together into one complete structure. The ampersand has the same basic meaning. Thanks again to everyone who helped me pick a font! I ended up slightly changing Gwendolyn.

So what is an ampersand?

Old Roman cursive, reed pen, 131 AD.

New Roman cursive, middle of 4th century.

New Roman cursive, ca 346 AD.

From a manuscript (St. Hilarius), before 509.

From a manuscript (St. Maximus), 7th century.

Carolingian minuscule, 810.

An ampersand (&), also commonly called an ‘and sign’, is a logo-gram representing the conjunction “and“. The symbol is a ligature of the letters in et, Latin for “and“. The word ampersand is a corruption of the phrase “and per se and”, meaning “and [the symbol which] by itself [is] and”. The Scots and Scottish English name for & is epershand, derived from “et per se and“, with the same meaning.

The ampersand can be traced back to the first century A.D. and the Old Roman cursive, in which the letters E and T occasionally were written together to form a ligature (figure 1). In the later and more flowing New Roman Cursive, ligatures of all kinds were extremely common; figure 2 and 3 from the middle of 4th century are both examples of how the et-ligature could look in this script. However, during the following development of the Latin script that lead up to the Carolingian minuscule (9th century), while the use of ligatures in general diminished, the et-ligature continued to be used and gradually became more stylized and less revealing of its origin (figures 4–6).

The main surviving use of the ampersand is in the formal names of businesses. When the ampersand forms part of a registered name (e.g. Brown & Watson), it should not be replaced with and. With the growth of mobile phone usage and text messaging, the ampersand is gaining new use in SMS language both as a representation for the word “and” and in rebus form, such as “pl&” in place of the word “planned”. The ampersand is also often used when addressing an envelope to a couple: “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” or “John & Jane”. — source –