After posting for four weeks for the year of the blog, I’ve noticed an interesting pattern in my writing. I am grammar’s biggest nightmare: I start a surprising number of my sentences with the word and.
And I’m not quite sure why.
Until the late nineteenth century, the last character of the alphabet wasn’t Z, but “&”. It makes sense to me that this stray character-word hybrid got appended to the alphabet. After all, children had to learn to read, write and speak it constantly. Life as little kids narrate it is just one long string of “and then, and then, and then..”
Conjunctions are also an easy part of speech to master for kids because they are a kind of linguistic superglue capable of binding together almost anything. Two seemingly unrelated words, ideas or concepts can come together, just by inserting an and between them. They become eternally bound just by virtue of being bookends of an and.
Ostriches and dinosaurs. Apples and oranges. And and And.
Back in ancient Rome, scribes resorting to cursive to write more rapidly, linked the two letters in “εt,” the Latin word for “and.” You can still make out the letters in fancier versions of the character.
As language changed with time, the character morphed into what we know today as the “&” and the word pronounced in whatever way the Roman locals pronounced as “and”.
The “&” appended to the alphabet posed a challenging problem. If you recite the alphabet, it’s almost as if you are leaving the listener with an incomplete sentence: “…X, Y, Z, and”
And what? So I make the common grammatical error of starting a sentence with and, but leaving one ending in and is definitely a bigger mistake. To solve for this, students were taught to use the phrase “per se,” meaning “in itself”. This was to indicate they meant the character “&”, and not the word “and”, and so the alphabet became “..X, Y, Z and per se and”. The phrase (like the character, like speech, like language, et al.) grew blurry with time slowly turning “&” into what we now call the ampersand.
I don’t exactly know when the “&” was dropped from the alphabet, but I’m sure it would have been impossible to drop from our vocabularies altogether. Of the more-than-million words in the English language, and is the fourth most common word1. And if you’ve read till here, you’ve read about 30 ands already.
I am and have always been obsessed with connections (if you haven’t already noticed). This website is just a giant visualization of hyperlinks. A project to associate everything I’m consuming with one another – however seemingly unrelated or related. A rapidly growing snowball for all my ands. Not just book ends of ands, but books of ands.
My love with and for connection stems from a part of my brain which I occasionally believe can be creative. Because creativity is just connections. It’s seeing one thing, knowing another completely independently, and putting an “and” between them to form something wholly new.
Learning, too, comes from association2. We tell people to “connect the dots” when we want them to learn something.
Relationships, bonds, connections all form because of this simple mind-math of addition. It doesn’t even matter if things don’t have any inherent link to begin with, because the effect of joining two or more things with an and is to create one.
And in itself reflects an existential truth – one that I grapple with all the time. Our condition is one of contradictions: I can be creative and uncreative. We can feel hot and cold at the same time. The world is full of suffering and pain and full of beauty and splendor. We are and live in perpetual and machines. And our condition is one of connections. To connect, to connect with, and to be connected with.
As Philip Roth once put it: “Life is and.”3 I think he meant that we do not live in a world of either/or. We live both, at once. With many things at once. Both, all the time. Everything not “per se”, by itself, but everything connected to something. Everything connected to its opposite, everything connected to itself. Everything connected to everything.
And so it is, in itself, connected to everything.
One of my favourite books from 2024, was one that was recommended to me by a professor: Lost & Found – Kathryn Schulz. While I have plenty to say about the book itself, this post turned out to be just a paraphrase of the entire last chapter.
- Source: Wikipedia ↩︎
- A concept I’m infatuated by and will write about more, Consilience ↩︎
- I can’t find the source for this except for in Lost & Found itself. ↩︎