Meet the Secret 27th Letter of the Alphabet

Pour one out for the humble zumzy-zan.

No puzzle from me this week, but here’s a nice, gentle one from PostMark on MyCrossword. My crash course on how to do cryptic puzzles begins here.

A 19th century version of the enduring children’s alphabet rhyme “A Apple Pie” (which dates back as far as 1671) has a surprising little interloper right at the end. The poem — a lurid, sensational tale of greed, jealousy, and (if you’re an apple pie) gore — goes like this:

A was an apple pie

B bit it,

C cut it,

D dealt it,

E eat it,

F fought for it,

G got it,

H had it,

I inspected it,

J jumped for it,

K kept it,

L longed for it,

M mourned for it,

N nodded at it,

O opened it,

P peeped in it,

Q quartered it,

R ran for it,

S stole it,

T took it,

U upset it,

V viewed it,

W wanted it,

X, Y, Z and ampersand

All wished for a piece in hand.

I certainly don’t want to litigate who has the rights to this contraband pastry (though I do think “M” is the only truly sympathetic character in the story), but one can’t help but wonder — as politely as possible — whether “ampersand” should really even be here at all. And while we’re asking questions, where the hell did it come from in the first place?

The earliest known ampersand, at Pompeii c. 79 AD (via Shady Characters)

Once upon a time (according to this delightful history of punctuation by Keith Houston, which I highly recommend), the ampersand was a word, and that word was et, the Latin word for “and.” Sometime before 79 AD (which is the first definitive example we have of the ampersand, in the form of Pompeiian graffiti), writers adopted a shorthand for et that turned it into a ligature (two or more letters joined together to make one symbol), similar to the way “a” and “e” sometimes get smushed into “æ” (known as an “ash.”) The ampersand evolved considerably over the intervening centuries, and you have to really squint to find the “e” and the “t” hidden in its most common modern form (&), though the ligature’s origins are easier to make out in different fonts and earlier evolutions.

Collected ampersands, some of which show the “Et” ligature origin more clearly (Via Shady Characters)

But despite its considerable popularity, “&” didn’t get its name until the 19th century, when — as our apple pie poem shows — it was often taught to schoolchildren as the 27th letter of the alphabet. Folk legend claims that the glyph got its name as a result of its frequent usage by the originator of the measurement “amp,” the French scientist André-Marie Ampere (as in, “this is Ampere’s and”), but the real story is much more elegant. 

A 19th Century ABC chart from the exercise book “Sanders’ Union Reader” with an ampersand (and a bonus etc.) included in the alphabet. (Via The Graphics Fairy)

Among alphabet learners in the 19th century, it was common to attach the Latin phrase “per se,” meaning “by itself,” to single letters that could also be words (such as “I” and “A”), as in “per se, I,” meaning “the letter ‘I’ by itself.” Following this tradition, young students learning their 27-letter alphabet were taught to recite from A-Z and then append the ‘&’ by saying “and, per se, and” at the end. Ampersand. 

Delightfully, “Ampersand” wasn’t the only way that students tended to mangle “and, per se, and,” and we could just as easily have ended up with one of the other common variants, including and-pussy-and, ampazad, and the absolutely wonderful zumzy-zan.

In a rather marvelous love letter to the ampersand, the writer Mairead Small Staid quotes a line from the poem “In the City of Light” by Larry Levis:

This isn’t the whole story.

The fact is, I was still in love.

My father died, & I was still in love.

The essay is a meditation on the power of that & to join disparate ideas, lashing together two different worlds of experience into a single entity with its own meaning and orbit. 

The ampersand signifies a closeness that and merely shrugs at, makes of two parts—or people—a single unit: Dolce & Gabbana. Rhythm & blues. Andrew & Martha.

Of course, the symbol also looks like nothing so much as a knot about to be tied.

I mention this mostly just because it’s a nice essay, but it’s also a sign of how far our little zumzy-zan has come, from a piece of graffiti to a spectator at an apple-pie massacre to a magical knot. Pretty decent consolation prize for losing its alphabet status.

An 1820s version of “A Apple Pie” with the ampersand intact, by Jemmy Catnach. See it in all its glory at Spitalfields Life.)