And what I write here might very well be covered in the next part of the history of the ampersand, that dude is writing. But when I read what he wrote today, it hit me so hard, I though I had to mention it here. So, here goes.

There are lots of variations of the ampersand. It does, happen to be one of the the characters typographers love playing around with, a lot. Because it has a lot of scope for beautifying, and it has perhaps the most character, for any character on the keyboard. Except for, maybe, ∞. But that isn’t played around much with, because it isn’t easily available on many keyboards (though, very delightingly, it is a simple ⌥ + 5 on a pretty Mac keyboard. Apples are awesome! ) And also, because it has an inherent symmetry that can’t be played much around with. It’s just a pretty serene character.

Back to the topic, ampersands, have a lot of charisma, by themselves, and hence a topic of great interest, for typographers, designers, and particularly typography designers. So people messed around with them, since time immemorial. Though that is not quite the case, which one’d learn from that other post I referred to in the start.

Now I always wrote the ampersand as &. (I don’t really plan to elaborate on the grammatical specifications of the ampersand, which is so crudely “banned” in illiterate environments like primary schools, and amongst my family members who try to correct my english. Sure I suck at everything, but knowing rules, is something I try my best to do. So, I just said that I’m not going to tell you, that an ampersand is used when one wants to say and, but not as a conjunction (loosely describing). XYZ & co., could not be broken into two sentences, unless one wanted to go to lengths of inconvenience and nonsense. There, and ampersand is used. It is also used when I’m completing a list of related objects. “In the morning, we do this, that & that too, and in the evening, we can sleep off because we’ve done everything in the morning.” Disclaiming note: There is no reference or requirement that my explanation have any accuracy whatsoever. If you really want to trust things, go to wikipedia, or something, and make sure the references aren’t random non-existent links. Don’t trust me. Ever. )

Back to the history of the ampersand, I always wrote it as &. And since that’s what the computer keyboard has, and most places have that, people who used to write an alternative — I used to believe were unnecessarily trying to intervene casual handwriting with calligraphy. And I used to think of that as corny. How you care for your characters, to me, says a lot about you. Also, I could never understand what they’re trying to write, and if it made any sense. It often looked like a hindi ‘ka’ to me. And a misture of stuf. Sometimes, only a few times though, it looked like an E to me. With some beautification. I could see the e much more pronouncedly in the rare typefaces which’d use the alternate ampersand. What always puzzled me, is which is ‘correct’, and how in hell they are used for the same thing. They don’t look a bit similar to me. I mean, in retrospect I can see how they come about. That’s the main point of this post.

In the other post I referred, the guy describes how ‘et’, was the derived shorthand for and, during some ancient Romans’ times (Cicero, the dude, go read that for specific info). And, etymologically (historically, perhaps) speaking, the ‘correct’ (original, actually) ampersand, is a ligature of the letters E and t. I’ll definitely not diverge so much as to tell you all about ligatures (that guys does cover… Once again, I’m not so distracted as to tell you that ligatures are pretty-looking sticking-togethers of two (and rarely, as in the case of ffi and ffl, more than two) characters, originated for greater flow in writing/reading, for prettier stuff (when people have to spend their lives writing thousand page books again and again, in a faultless beautiful handwriting, I’d only appreciate them not dying of creativity and making new typographic thingies, some of them also exhibiting a laziness of completing formations), and lately, with a more purposeful aim, of trying to avoid inconsistent printing, and letter overlaps, such as in the case of not-specifically kerned fs and is, which causes the terminal curve of the f to overlap with the dot of i. Notice a majority of serif-font headlines in your newspaper — unless it’s some awesome newspaper (and if it is, do tell me. I’d actually try to switch my subscription :O ), if a small f and i are consecutive letters, there’s be a small overlap in the i’s dot — which is maybe called a tittle — and the curve of the letter f, which is called a terminal. If it’s an unimaginably awesome newspaper (like the New York Times — and that comparison is not arbitrary — I’ve seen ligatures in it), the f and i would actually be combined with a ligature. It’s slightly less pronounced in Hindustan Times as far as I’ve seen, because all their headlines have arbitrarily changing fonts. An ffi ligature looks like ffi. And again, I wasn’t supposed to be telling that to you at all.

So, back to the ampersand, the original ampersand, is the one shown above. Though it’s not the very original one either! It’s just one in which the original meaning is rather preserved. Unlike the terribly modified one we now use. This image shows the ampersand in different typefaces, almost in a chronological order, which is pretty much the entire aim of this article, in a rather embarassingly small size (an image is more worth than a thousand words preceding it? I hope not. ).

’

I don’t know if Fago was the original et ligature used, but excepting that, one can see the laziness, along with the joining of curves, going from Palatino (2,2) -> Flux (1,2) -> Lithos (4,3) (this being the most significant jump/connect I never noticed until I knew the et-origin) -> Trajan (2,3) -> Helvetica Neue. Very cool, I thought.

[ppy]From the good…

to the okay…

to the randomly lame…

to the most fricking-awesome.

[ppy]

Man, I’m one to applaud for modesty. Anyways, my life’s been pretty thoroughly riddled with awesomeness recently hence, I have little time to waste on relating much about it. Hopefully, I’ll still be around to rub some of my awesomeness onto you, again.

What is 7 times 6?

What is 9 times 5 to the base 13?

What is the ultimate answer to life, universe and everything?

What is the number of this post on this blog?

Here goes my 42nd post. It ain’t exactly no landmark, but still. Have fun. Can you imagine you actually bore the torture for so long? 

Or perhaps, did you know this blog was really so small?

[ratings]

 [Update: The image is now a bit cleaner. I just cleaned up the background which I was hating quite a bit. ]

I missed the Towel Day, which was to be celebrated on the 25th of May. Which is in fact. a very sad thing to happen, but yeah… I’ll take care not to miss it the next time around! 364 days left for it, after all! :-O

You can also know if it is Towel Day, just to keep your own check! Apart from that, one important question that might come to you is — (or at least it came to me!) as to why the 25th of May. As I mentioned, the official site of the Holy Day, says:

Many other dates for celebrations had been proposed. For those with an exceptionally long attention span: the 42nd day of the year (“Happy Adams Day”), 42 days after his death (“Second Day of Remembering”), the 11th of March (his birthday, around which from 2003 on a yearly “Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture” is held), the Friday before the 42nd week-end day of the year (occasionally falls on 25 May, as it did the year he died), etc.

Of all these dates, May 25th turned out to be the one that gained a significant following.

As the universe that Douglas Adams created was full of absurdity and randomness, it may be a fitting choice after all. And if you need an additional reason: if you add the hexadecimal numbers 25 and 5, and convert the result to decimal, you get 42!

Thrilling, eh? The FAQ answers most questions most questions of anybody. Even non-geeks. But still, for whoever doesn’t want to go off this site to read somewhere else (Thanks for the love!! ), why the towel at all? Once again I quote, but this time, the HitchHiker’s Guide to The Galaxy:

A towel (…) is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value — you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-tohand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you — daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Hence a phrase which has passed into hitch hiking slang, as in “Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.”

(Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with;

Hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)

Hope you too, by now, regret having missed Towel Day. Read about it, and you could also check about the coming of the Towel Day, in minutes and seconds, here. [Do Remember to remind me the next year! ]

P.S.: You can download the .psd of the above image– as proof of the fact that I myself hand-crafted it. Nice, eh? Hope it somehow, somewhere helps you in your life.…

Here goes the link.