What
is your nerd quotient?
If you are a regular reader of the blog it is probably quite high. But unless you've developed a daily habit for BBC 4, with its documentaries and posh accents, you're just a poser.
NOW, for only four more days, be sure and catch BBC 4's half-hour documentary on the ampersand.
I know! Right!!??
There in all it's typographic glory is the tale of how the word "et," meaning "and" in Latin, went from a scribe's squiggle to Monsieur Garamond's masterpiece of font engraving with the advent of moveable type.
It was every font designer's way to show off.
And just as those fancy modern folks were about to replace it with the plus sign, Steve Jobs dared to "Think Different" and typography became a part of the Mac. But now, in logic that only an engineer and computer programmer could understand, HTML requires a whole string of characters, beginning with an ampersand itself, just to make an ampersand part of a web page.
Notwithstanding the engineers and code punchers, typography and elegance march on.
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