AMPERSAND, n. The name of this symbol & comes from a variant pronunciation of “and per se and.” School teachers used to add “per se” to their recitation of the alphabet when they arrived at letters that could also be words by themselves: I per se I, for instance. The symbol & used to be treated as the 27th letter of the alphabet. (It was later dropped because it doesn’t represent a speech sound.) People called it either “et” (Latin for “and”) or just “and.” Most of the people who routinely recite the alphabet are kids, so “and per se and” because “ampersand.”
Even better, in French the symbol is called “esperluette” (sometimes “esperluète” or “perluète”), which means the same thing, but you gotta decipher it. “Esperluette” comes from Occitan (a regional language of southern France) es per lou et, literally “it’s for the et,” and et is “and.” The Trésor de la langue française, which is the French equivalent of the OED, confirms the story about kids reciting the alphabet and arriving, exhausted, at the final character “et.” Children are the same everywhere.
We can all imagine kids rushing through “es per lou et” or “and per se and” in order to do something more fun, but it’s also worth remembering that kids may have analyzed “es per lou et” or “and per se and” as a single word anyway. Likelihood that little 19th-century English school children grasped the Latin phrase per se: close to zero.
Kids are constantly awash in words they don’t understand, so sometimes they do something linguists call “rebracketing.” Adults do it, too, but you probably have plentiful examples from your own childhood or kids you know. As a child, my husband interpreted the warning “those pillows are off-limits” as “those pillows are all flimits.” A flimit, he intuited, was a little demon of some kind, and there was a host of them living in the pillows, and that was why he wasn’t allowed to touch them.
If “off-limits” means nothing to you, then you just have to figure out from context what a “flimit” might be. Similarly, if your teacher makes you say something that sounds like “ampersand” at the end of the alphabet when you arrive at the character &, well, in that case context tells you “ampersand” is the name of &. Words are whatever we want them to be.
This week in Capital-R Romance, some history. At the end of July, a statue of Joséphine de Beauharnais, Mrs. Napoléon, slaveowner and dictator’s wife, got righteously toppled in Martinique. Writer and illustrator Joanne Renaud did a great thread on it, so credit to her for these links, including this article in English about how the statue was already beheaded and regularly refreshed with red paint, in case you were wondering how Martinique’s residents felt about Her Majesty the Empress, as well as this article in French about Joséphine’s relationship with slavery. Spoiler alert: there is no evidence that Joséphine cared about the human rights atrocities being committed all around her for her entire life, which is standard for 18th- and 19th-century white people and also pretty fucking damning.
It was unconscionable for Joséphine de Beauharnais to disregard the suffering upon which her whole life was founded, and we shouldn’t do that, either. I feel like if somebody brutally exploited other human beings and made those people fear for their lives—the constant threat of death or cruelty is the only way to “own” a person—then that fact should be the number one thing mentioned about them forever. Sure, if we wanna talk about how they married Napoléon or helped draft the US Constitution or whatever, we can say that. But we also gotta say this person was a slave master. We’ve gone too long without it.
(Also, while we’re trashing Regular Napoleon and Josephine, let’s also mark the 150th anniversary of Shitty Baby Napoleon surrendering to the Prussians on September 4, 1870, ending France’s Second Empire.)
In small-r romance, I read
Something to Talk About (lesbian f/bi f, both cis, contemporary) by Meryl Wilsner. A super slow-burn contemporary about a TV showrunner and her assistant, the rumors they stir up in Hollywood, and the romance they won’t allow themselves to have. Content warnings: sexual harassment (by a supporting character, not between the protagonists), a queer character with an unsupportive parent, sex.
The Care and Feeding of Waspish Widows (lesbian f/bi f, both cis, historical) by Olivia Waite. Another slow-burn romance, but set in early 19th-century London and the fictional town of Melliton, with beekeeping and the printing of quasi-seditious literature! Like all the best fictional small towns, Melliton has a charming and quirky cast of residents, and I was very taken with the cranky and eccentric old poet Joanna Moseley. Plus, this book has epistolary chapters, which I always love to see. Content warnings: grief, possible threat of homophobic violence against a supporting character, sex.
And in internet miscellany &c, I thought about this tumblr post—about poet and translator Anne Carson and her pinstriped blazer and her vibe of “like if you met god at a garden party and she handed you a pitcher of cream and asked you why you think you should get into heaven”—and then I had to go hunting for it so I could experience it a second time, so here it is, lest you need that, too.
I wish you all a good week. See you Sunday!