Ampersand Another Thing ...

I was surprised, on attempting to publish the foregoing, to discover that Blogger does not permit the use of ampersands. Why, of all punctuation marks, its wrath has fallen on that lowly indicator of conjunction, demands a degree of scrutiny.

An ampersand is helpless. A figure eight with a kickstand, it only appears in public once it has a stout companion on either side of it. In fact, it is so evidently vulnerable that one is only surprised that there is no caseworker from Social Services standing idly by as it dies of neglect. (Perhaps there is ... when one's principal professional duties involving standing idly by it can be difficult to tell whether your apathy is directed at one or another of your wards, which perhaps goes to explain how Social Services can handle so many people at once.)

Not so the mighty And. Just as the grey squirrel drove out our sickly domestic variety, so And strides forth, displacing the timorous ampersand and vanquishing the mighty comma before standing fearlessly at the head of the sentence, where no And had ventured before him. And is a creature of muscle and sinew; ampersand is the debased descendent of a once-proud lineage.

Yet ampersand has much to commend it. In these days of anorexia, its pear-shaped figure is so much more healthy than the two dry sticks that form the emaciated +. M+S would never, one fears, have become such a bastion of underwear sales to the Middle Class; it was the voluptuous ampersand that gave us confidence in the robustness of its elastic. As the name of a museum, the V+A is suggestive of sensational excess rather than comforting collections of buttons and lace bobbins. Perhaps the entire banking industry lurched hideously into the red when the Alliance and Leicester elevated the cross (most commonly used, after all, as a marker for graves) above the ampersand in its corporate branding.

If it is all over for the ampersand then how many of us, I wonder, will discover our fates to have been subtly bound to that of this unassuming mark of punctuation. Given that its only purpose was to hold things together, one could hardly be surprised.