Diacritiques

Language Log brings it to our attention that a hoax might be giving millions of web users the wrong idea about the history and etymology of NYC’s nickname The Big Apple.

The term didn’t in fact originate with an early 19th-century immigrant from France named Eve, who (supposedly) ran a brothel and called the women who worked for her by a name that alluded to the biblical Eve’s fruit. A much more solid argument has been made by Barry Popik. It involves black stable workers from New Orleans and the horse-racing journalist John J. Fitz Gerald, who repeatedly used the word on the pages of the New York Morning Telegraph in the mid-1920s. Barry Popik’s findings are all over his site in little bits and pieces, but Cecil Adams at The Straight Dope conveniently summarises Popik’s research.

Adobe’s site has a beautiful page about the history of the ampersand, the way it developed from a ligature of the letters e and t of the Latin word et. (Via Language Hat, who got it from aldibronti at Wordorigins.)

In French, the &-sign is or used to be called pirlouette, perluette, perluète, éperluète or esperluette. The term comes either from packing lat. perna (meaning leg, or a type of cockle), sphoerula and uvula into a single word or (and?) finding a playful rhyme on zed, to be added by children learning the alphabet after saying the letter z “to finish with a pretty rhyme”, according to the site linked to above. (Respectful suggestion: cutting down on the synonyms might be the only way to keep the word from becoming totally obsolete.)

We don’t all have Adobe software and fonts installed, but some beauties are accessible to everyone. The first image (on the left) shows what you get when typing “&” in the URW Chancery L font (installed on my Linux box, I don’t know exactly when or how; maybe it came with Open Office), the second the pretty ampersand of Penguin Attack.

Something tells me that the latter font was probably forged for Linux, but anyone interested can download and use the (TTF) file; it is distributed under the GPL.

In most fonts, either the middle horizontal stroke of the (often) ε-shaped e or the lower part of its second semi-circle form the vertical part of the t. Few fonts seem to use one of these strokes to become the t’s horizontal stroke, though, the way I have seen it in many French people’s handwriting.

The picture on the right shows mine, which I adopted because my handwritten traditional ampersands always come out horribly crooked. (The image is ugly, I fear, but that’s what happens when I try to draw with a slippery optical mouse.)

Still, browsing through my fonts, I can find a few that do. The one on the left is from a font called Bradley Hand ITC, the one on the right shows the ampersand in Kaufmann Thin.

Oh the serendipitous nature of blogging!

It has only now come to my attention that crime author Ian Rankin’s site provides audio extracts (AmE: excerpts) from nine of his Inspector Rebus novels. If you click here, eg, you will be taken to a two minutes or so snippet (in Macromedia Flash format) of Black & Blue, read in a most beautiful Scottish accent. I’m going to listen to all of them again and again until I understan’ each and every word. (I’m still having problems with three or four bits, but I won’t get the books out and cheat.)

Yesterday, I unexpectedly got to duty as a lumberjack’s assistant. Two thirds of an old and creaky plum tree had come down under the weight of its ripening fruit in the backyard of some friends I was dropping in on. So today’s BBC News headline Saws face axe in forests of future caught my attention […]

After last month’s dismal elections, the EU parliament’s (newly renamed) Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality is getting a new member from Britain, UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom. The Guardian tells us a little more about this champion of women’s rights. In his own words: I want to deal with women’s issues because […]

Here is a nice and useful list of French/English false cognates. (A strange term, that. Most of them are real cognates after all. Aren’t we allowed to say false friends? It’s got a nice alliteration.) Purple is French, Green English.

“That is one butch chick,” is the Gender Genie’s unchanging comment when I once again inform it (him? her?) that I am, in fact, not male. Its verdict has a very funny side since I am not butch either, though several of my dearest friends are, and proud of it, and I of them. But […]

Sorry for today’s layout upheaval. There were a number of css bugs that needed fixing and problems that only showed up in Internet Explorer, which is not available in my setup. For once, it was not all IE’s fault. Those nifty new navigation-cum-language-changing bars were more difficult to implement than I had thought. I learnt […]

You stumble into a room, by chance, and before your eyes appears a wondrous display. As you get closer, amazing events start to unfold. You savour the sounds, words, images, and when they seem wind down you think the curtain is about to fall. But no, the scene just shifts, and new marvels materialise. And […]

ˌser.ənˈdɪp.ɪ.ti  is getting more and more bilingual! Thanks to noprerequisite’s language picker plugin (and my fiddling with the template) reading this blog in the language of your choice has become much easier. You have two options: Imagine you are reading a post that exists in both English and French and you’d like to see the French […]