Peter Riley wrote
|When I put my cursor in the middle of Pete Smith's FROM THE DISPENSARY and
|click twice meaning "Select one word" it doesn't, oddly, select the whole
|text, but most of it. It omits the first line up to the ampersand. When I
|do the same within that first line it selects only up to the ampersand.
|This means that someone in computer-universe has decided that an ampersand
|is not a word, but a word-break, or if it is a word it is also a
|word-break. These things should interest us as poets.
I think what it is is this
that early on in email - and many of us are still there - to send certain
characters such as the pound sign you had to code them because they weren't
in the basic character set - and that set has hardly changed from the first
railway telegraph character sets
you remember the railways?
and seems to me that the ampersand was used as a way of saying _there's a
code coming_
forward slash is used similarly in some systems
I am a bit vague on this because i could never be bothered to learn the
codes and went round it instead using capital L for pound signs and the like
in such a system the ampersand has to be seen as being outside the lexicon
otherwise it can't be used as a control signal - like making it a corporal!
it certainly is part of our area of concern - it affects how we notate and
transmit our texts - but although it may seem arbitrary such things have
been decided consensually somewhere - the international committee for using
ampersands or something - and there isnt any malign purpose behind it
_&_ v _and_ is an interesting one... i have found myself feeling the
rightness
of one rather than the other in many circumstances without any sense of how
i came to such feelings - and i read them aloud the same
L
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