Laura Egley Taylor

Perpetually lapsed tweeter

[Raphael Glucksmann @rglucks1]

Dear Americans,

Since the White House press secretary is attacking me today, I wanted to tell you this ⤵️

[Daniel Korski @DanielKorski]

Winston Churchill in the White House…

Not wearing a suit because he is at war

[Laura Egley Taylor @egleytaylor]

@briancrandall I have referenced Howard Dean and that utterance SO MANY TIMES in the last 8 years

[George Johnson @byGeorgeJohnson]

Thanks to @SFIPress for publishing a revised and expanded edition of my biography of physicist Murray Gell-Mann, with a new foreword by Douglas Hofstadter. https://t.co/zCRvZBLQ3t

[Laura Egley Taylor @egleytaylor]

@MBagavathiannan @USDA_ARS @tamusoilcrop And this single photo “showing the overview of the site”

[Laura Egley Taylor @egleytaylor]

@MBagavathiannan @USDA_ARS @tamusoilcrop @MBagavathiannan Found some of my dad’s (oldschool paper folders!) files. Not sure what he had already sent to Dr. Chandler—let me know if more info would be helpful.

[Laura Egley Taylor @egleytaylor]

This just made my YEAR

[Muthu Bagavathiannan @MBagavathiannan]

What an incredible feeling for being a part of this 50-yr weed seed burial study, established by Drs. Grant Egley and Mike Chandler in 1972 at Stoneville, MS. Stay tuned for the results! Thanks to Dr. Reddy and team for arranging the excavations! @USDA_ARS @tamusoilcrop

[Laura Egley Taylor @egleytaylor]

@MBagavathiannan @USDA_ARS @tamusoilcrop Dr Egley was my dad. Our family is thrilled to see this! I was showing your photos to my mom and she said she sewed the little bags that the seeds are in on her sewing machine.

[The Cultural Tutor @culturaltutor]

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.

[Laura Egley Taylor @egleytaylor]

@jsalowe @gathcreator @HypertextMag 🙌🏼🤛🏻🤘🏼😊

[Laura Egley Taylor @egleytaylor]

@jsalowe

[Laura Egley Taylor @egleytaylor]

@KarlosLMarshall @TheConscious__ Wow. Way to go!!!

[Laura Egley Taylor @egleytaylor]

Love my job!

[SFI Press @SFIPress]

Thank you @JamesGleick for joining our booth at the #IPFest for a book signing!

In case you missed it – don't worry, you can still grab a (unsigned) copy and say hi to our team.

[SFI Press @SFIPress]

We're taking inspiration from Anna Atkins’ cyanotypes for one of our upcoming volumes! Here's a behind-the-scenes look at our experiments this week.

[Laura Egley Taylor @egleytaylor]

@KarlosLMarshall @univofdayton Woo-hoo! Way to go, Doc!

[Laura Egley Taylor @egleytaylor]

@jsalowe 🔥

[Laura Egley Taylor @egleytaylor]

@jsalowe What a sweet, quiet (cowless) space!

[Laura Egley Taylor @egleytaylor]

@jsalowe Ya done good, kid

[Laura Egley Taylor @egleytaylor]

@jsalowe YAY MARY 🙌

[Laura Egley Taylor @egleytaylor]

@jsalowe Ooh now I want a rooster light switch that crows when you turn it on