Erin

🇨🇦🇯🇲🇬🇧 settled in southern Germany with my family. Travel & culture blogger, among other things. sie/her

[Erin @erinehm]

You don't know side eye until you drop off your child at a German school 10 minutes late.

[Erin @erinehm]

I am no longer posting here, fyi. Left for the other place.

[Erin @erinehm]

@PurlTurtle I wish I could come see you two! I am wall to wall with meetings and going back tomorrow evening. ☹️

[Erin @erinehm]

On my way to Köln, absolutely knackered. Have spilt coffee on myself twice and it’s not even 8:30am.

[Erin @erinehm]

It’s for a work thing so it would better if I felt a bit less blergh.

[Nic Houghton @40PercentGerman]

My favourite part about this time of year is the German media teaching Germans about inflation via the ever increasing price of Oktoberfest beer.

[Erin @erinehm]

@nthnashma Exactly this.

[Erin @erinehm]

@germany_iam Outlanders, Grindstone

[Erin @erinehm]

@MCinHD Wow! So amazing! Good luck!

[Erin @erinehm]

@cherrysberries I have a photo on my LinkedIn profile because that’s a different audience - I post regularly there and have conversations related to my industry.

[Erin @erinehm]

@cherrysberries I refuse to do this - it opens the door to too much discrimination in my mind. Nowhere I applied requested it, and if I didn’t get a callback because of it, I’m confident I wouldn’t have wanted to work there.

[Erin @erinehm]

@buhashee @cherrysberries So I’d reconsider assuming someone is being ‘lazy’ by not including it.

[Erin @erinehm]

@buhashee @cherrysberries No I wouldn’t say lazy. In the UK and Canada, two other countries where I’ve worked, it’s illegal to request a photo. Personally I find it inappropriate to ask for one as it makes it much likely the hiring team will discriminate and don’t ever include one.

[Erin @erinehm]

@MCinHD What exam is this?? Also Sept sounds good.

[Erin @erinehm]

@MCinHD I hear you re AfD, but don’t lose heart. I remember my mum saying when JFK and Malcolm X were sssassinated, she though the world would end and nothing good would ever happen again. Hang in there. x

[Erin @erinehm]

@MCinHD I’m sorry my friend. I know the feeling. I’m in Canada right now but let’s definitely go for dinner or something at the end of August when I’m back. xx

[Erin @erinehm]

@40PercentGerman Lol. Just maybe.

[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.