The term ampersand, as Geoffrey Glaister writes in his “Glossary of the Book,” is a corruption of and (&) per se and, which literally means “(the character) & by itself (is the word) and.”
The symbol & is derived from the ligature of ET or et, which is the Latin word for “and.”One of the first examples of an ampersand appears on a piece of papyrus from about 45 A.D. Written in the style of early Roman capital cursive (typical of the handwriting of the time), it shows the …

Protest rallies are annoying. Inefficient, too. Nicole (a wavy, spacey new agey girl from work) said, “It just seems like a waste of resources.” Wow. Resource allocation. Not the first thing I expected to hear from Nicole (but, I’m wrong(ish) about people all the time, maybe she’s a closet realist). She’s fucking got it, though. Waste of resources. Waste of time. Waste of TV, blog, radio coverage. Here’s my solution (which I won’t do anything about - I leave that to the idealists - I don’t really care if Tibet …

This is one of my favorite things ever. From Stephen Hawking’s 1988 book A Brief History of Time:
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world …