You're listening to Away with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Barnett.

Perhaps you've noticed a trend among some businesses to use an ampersand between two nouns like Creighton Barrel or here in San Diego we have a couple

of wonderful restaurants cloak and pedal and soda and swine. I was thinking about this because I had a few laughs yesterday when I stumbled across

hipster business dot name which is on the web and you can just keep hitting refresh and it will generate all these business

names that look perfectly plausible that have Ampersands in the middle of two nouns.

So like, Zebra and Well, Day and Bucket,

or Anger and Pearl, or Rainstorm and Egg.

I would go to a place called Rainstorm and

Yeah, what do they sell their plumbing supplies?

I had a few laughs, it's really fun to visit,

but that sent me down a rabbit hole of reading about Ampersands and they are so cool.

Did you know that it used to be that they were regarded as sort of the 27th letter of the alphabet?

I did know that they used to be included on the

like when they were demonstrating scripts they would often throw them on the ends

right? Yeah yeah. Yeah or you can find books from the 19th century kids school

books you know where they have all the 26

letters written out and then the last thing on there that the kids would

memorize was that little symbol at the very end it was sort of more or less the

27th letter then Then I was thinking, well why is it called an Ampersand?

And that's really cool too. We're talking about that squiggly symbol that looks sort of like a treble clef, right?

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