dominique Touchaud

What the hell is an ampersand and why does it look like that?! The first thing you need to know is that "&" used to be the 27th letter of the alphabet... But there are three parts to this story. And the first begins over two thousand years ago in Ancient Rome with a single word: et. It's the Latin for "and". At some point Roman scribes started combining the two letters of et into a single symbol, which was the ancestor of our modern &. The earliest example of the "et" symbol is actually from graffiti in Pompeii. In any case, it did not disappear with the fall of the Roman Empire. Latin survived as the language of the Catholic Church and of scholarship in Medieval Europe. Scribes during the Dark Ages continued to use the & symbol. It evolved down the centuries, in places losing any semblance of the letters e and t whatsoever. The second part of the story is that during the 18th and 19th centuries, as education and the teaching of literacy spread, & was added to the end of the alphabet as a sort of 27th letter. On a related note, although "et cetera" is now usually just abbreviated as etc., for a long time it was instead abbreviated as "&c". The & was for et and the c for cetera. The third and final part of the story is about how the alphabet was taught to children — and how it was read out loud. As this 1822 Glossary of Words and Phrases explains, it had been normal during the Renaissance, when speaking the alphabet, to add "per se" before any letter which could also be a word on its own — "per se" means "by itself" in Latin. Take the letter A, which can also be a word of its own. When reading out the alphabet people would say "A, per se A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, per se I..." and so on. O was also considered a word of its own. Which means, when people got to the end of the alphabet, with & being the 27th letter, they would say: "S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, and per se &." When this old way of reading the alphabet was taught to children in the 18th century and they were reciting it aloud, they would garble "and per se " into what eventually became... ampersand. A Dic­tion­ary of Slang and Col­lo­quial Eng­lish from 1905 relates some of the many other pronunciations school children apparently came up with: "Am­persand. The sign &; am­persand. Vari­ants: Ann Passy Ann; an­pasty; an­dpassy; an­parse; aper­sie; per-se; am­passy; am-passy-ana; am­pene-and; am­pus-and; ampsyand; am­pazad; am­siam; am­pus-end; ap­perse-and; em­per­siand; am­perzed; and zumzy-zan." Well, of all the many pronunciations that might have stuck, it was "ampersand" which came to be accepted and is now the official name for &... rather than zumzy-zan. So, from hurried Roman scribes to unruly school children, that's where "&" came from.

Students at NYU asked the creators of South Park the million-dollar question: “What makes a good story?” They gave one of the best explanations of story I’ve heard: “If we can take the beats of your outline, and the words ‘and then’ belong between those beats… you got something pretty boring. What should happen between every beat you’ve written down is the words ‘therefore’ or ‘but.’” They go on to say, “That gives you the causation between each beat, and that makes a story.” Point 1: There’s an idea in storytelling called ‘Promise, Progress, Payoff.’ Essentially, a story is a neverending cycle of promises that are paid off over the span of the story. It’s a cycle of expectation and resolution. Cause and effect. Conflict and progress. Point 2: A story isn’t a bunch of random events thrown together. A story is a series of but / because / therefore moments. A famous example: • Harry discovers he's a wizard. Because of this, he goes to learn magic at Hogwarts. • But then he learns Voldemort wants to kill him and rule the world. • Therefore, he must find a way to defeat him. Point 3: ‘And’ implies a simple continuation. ‘But / Therefore’ give prior events meaning through causation. ‘But’ implies conflict. ‘Therefore’ implies progress. I’m reminded of a Hemingway quote: “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.” Great writing is intentional. It doesn’t wander. It builds upon itself. *** I hope you enjoyed that! If so, follow @nathanbaugh27. I study the best storytellers ever and share what I learn.

Suite aux émeutes, il faut agir: je suis prête à travailler avec les parents des quartiers et même à intervenir dans les maisons d'arrêt auprès des jeunes qui sont incarcérés. Il y a beaucoup à faire et c'est essentiel. Soutenez-moi #vivreensemble #paix #jeunesse #laïcité