The beauty of the ampersand and other keyboard symbols

This is such a great idea: a book with one short essay per punctuation mark or typographical symbol. Of course, our commas, ampersands and exclamation marks all come from somewhere; all were invented at some point or another and their stories are ever-changing. Computer coders, for example, have recently moved previously unsung but elegant marks such as the hashtag and the ‘at’ sign back to centre stage.

Claire Cock-Starkey is a confident and likeable host and makes a witty crack about her own surname in her essay on the hyphen. She somehow elevates what could have been a nerdy primer into something grander, and at various moments the book becomes meditative, poetic, philosophical and funny, as well as scholarly.

There is much to enjoy. The strangely named and beautifully shaped ampersand, we’re told, evolved from the Latin ‘et’. It is strictly called a ‘glyph’, and Cock-Starkey reveals that in the 18th century it was honoured with the 27th place in the alphabet. As for its weird name, it derives from the phrase ‘and per se and’, used by poor 18th- century children when reciting the alphabet, per se meaning ‘standing on its own’. It became an official word in 1837.

Many punctuation marks were invented by the ancient Greeks, evolved by the medievals and fixed by the early printers. The colon, for example, which means ‘limb’, was invented by Aristophanes of Byzantium — not the playwright, but a librarian. It originally looked like a full stop and was intended to mark a breathing space between sections of text for the purposes of reading out loud. The great seventh-century linguist Isidore of Sevile then decided on a three dot system for different lengths of pause: low dot for short pause, middle dot for medium pause, high dot for long pause.