Fresh Kills

The Inside Story of the Recovery Operation after 9/11

National September 11 Memorial & Museum Auditorium, May 15 2023

https://www.911memorial.org/events/fresh-kills-inside-story-recovery-operation-after-911

Panelists included FBI Supervisory Special Agent and Incident Co-Commander Richard Marx, former Director of the Bureau of Waste Disposal of the Department of Sanitation Martin Bellew, and former NYPD Lieutenant Commander of Detectives Roger Parrino, who discussed the Fresh Kills operation. This should be required viewing for all Americans.

The following needs to be read with the utmost respect for these people, the victims, their families, the workers, and the general American public; it's not meant to be sensational or exploitative in any way, and this information is being repeated here in an effort to keep alive in our memories the sacrifices made, especially by the people who did this work to ensure that families of victims would be given closure. Granted nothing like this had ever happened before in America, but certainly nothing like this recovery effort had ever been attempted, not at this scale, not under these conditions, and not in response to such a national tragedy.

*Also, for those not from the area, it should be pointed out that the word Kill means river in Dutch, who were the first people to start naming things on the East Coast in the 1700's(?), and so we have rivers named Arthur Kill or Kill van Kull, etc. This is where the name Fresh Kills comes from. There is no association between the name and death; that's all just historical coincidence. 

• It just so happens that Fresh Kills, the oldest largest landfill in the United States (maybe the world) had just been decommissioned in March 2001, only six months prior to 9/11
• 700 people identified either by their remains or personal effects
• 1,000 remain
• They could see down to 1/4 inch; the one guy kept a marble in his pocket to show the families how hard they were looking
• Anthropologists got called in, they had to differentiate the humans from the food; there were 15-20 restaurants at the World Trade
• Everything was pulverized so that all you saw was wheel casters on office chairs and credit cards; ID cards too but less
• 17 operating unions at Fresh Kills, 24k people working or volunteering, 30 city, state and federal agencies
• There were cars at Ground Zero, some driven away some towed
• They're wearing asbestos monitors and seeing 4x the limit ... outdoors (that's 4x the indoor limit but outdoors, which is really hard to do because the air is always blowing around and being diluted...)
• Ground Zero was called The Pile
• They talk about the extent of decon and PPE at 40 minutes
• The smell, prompted by an audience question: The canines got depressed. It smelled so strongly of dead people they couldn't use their sense of smell to find them, and since they couldn't do their job they got depressed
• They built tents on top of the landfill, for admin purposes etc., and the methane accumulated in them because it comes right out of the ground, also it bubbles when it rains in a landfill, again from all the methane coming out of the ground
• The idea of building structures on a landfill is crazy, both from a structural, and just a general safety point of view

Image credit: Christopher Payne Brother Island maybe a Sanatorium

https://chrispaynephoto.com

The image above is almost totally unrelated to 9/11, except that it's from New York City, except that it's not. It's a photograph taken by Christopher Payne, who takes really cool pictures of industrial sites and sometimes abandoned sites. This was taken on Brother Island, one of the very few deserted islands off New York City. It was inhabited at some point, by people looking to get away from the city almost a hundred years ago, and later by a sanatorium, and maybe some other City entities. It's been closed down since the 1970's and nobody except a handful of research scientists and photographers have been allowed to visit since. 

Reading at Home

I read this during the pandemic of 2020, trapped in my own house.

At Home: A Short History of Private Life

Bill Bryson, 2010

• Confetti GPS: Guests at Wentworth Woodhouse, a stately pile in Yorkshire, were given silver boxes with personalized confetti, which they could sprinkle through the corridor to help them find their way back to, or between, rooms. (p138)
• Dude so cheap that he refused to dot his i's when he wrote, to save on ink (p213)
• Another dude so rich, he owns two houses side by side, one to live in, and one to redecorate over and over (p335-6)
• The London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Co. and the Stiff Express Railway, 1854 (p390)
• The track transported mourners and coffins to two private stations within the cemetery: the Brookwood Cemetery South station served the Anglican sections, whilst the North station served the nonconformist sections. The London terminus, which opened in 1854, was specially built to perfectly meet the needs of its primary purpose, with waiting rooms for mourners and funeral services, storage for coffins, and a hydraulic lift to raise the coffins to platform level for their transport to the Cemetery. Brookwood Cemetery and the London Necropolis Train [link]
• The railway was operated by the London Necropolis Company, who offered three different classes of funerals. First class funeral parties were offered private waiting rooms and carriages, and could gather to watch the coffin being loaded into a first-class compartment. Third class parties shared a communal waiting room; however, Brookwood offered each body an individual plot, granting a level of dignity to the “pauper class”, as most other cemeteries continued the practice of mass graves for the poor. Brookwood Cemetery and the London Necropolis Train [link]
• Society for the Rescue of Boys Not Yet Convicted of Any Criminal Offence (p591)
• Not YET [Homer Simpson]

Thomas Barnardo's Fake photographs of 1858 (p595)

After his first homes for orphans began to open in the 1870s, Barnardo used photographs of his rescued children to use in adverts for fundraising - of which he was a master.

"Before" and "after" pictures would be taken, showing orphans in a state of neglect immediately after they had been rescued from the street, and then afterwards, all scrubbed clean and full of promise.

But in 1877 Barnardo found himself accused of artificially staging the photographs, alongside other allegations that he enriched himself with charity money and that children were physically abused in his homes.

In a pamphlet entitled Startling Revelations, the minister said: "[Barnardo] tears their clothes, so as to make them appear worse than they really are. A lad named Fletcher is taken with a shoeblack's box upon his back, although he never was a shoeblack."

In July 1877, Barnardo admitted in court the artistic license he took with the photography, claiming that he never intended to make particular portraits but rather wanted to depict individuals as representative of their "class".

The case was so important because the status of photography was, at the time, a medium by which some kind of visual "truth" was supposed to be revealed. The idea that Barnardo had staged many of his photographs destabilised a Victorian notion of what it was to be an "authentically" poor child.

[It's still being done in 2002, for the foundation he started, and nobody seems to mind anymore, because the intent is good.]

-The Echoes of Barnardo's Altered Imagery, Mark Oliver and Zeta McDonald, The Guardian, Oct 2002

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2002/oct/03/advertising.childprotection

Okay To Be Redhead

In the largest genetic study of hair colour to date (350,000), a team at Edinburgh University has discovered eight previously-unknown genetic differences between redheads and non-redheads.

The only reason I  mention this is to add a phrase that really strikes me lately -- the redheaded stepchild.

I had been hearing it here and there, but within this past year, it was in the headline of a news article in a local newspaper, I believe it was like 'New Jersey being treated like a red-headed stepchild.'

The fact that such a phrase was being used in a (relatively) reputable news source seemed borderline outrageous to me. I am not necessarily a proponent of political correctness, unless of course you're simply referring to common courtesy. But in today's world I thought it was strange that anyone would use, in a derogatory way, a term that is derived from the way someone looks.

But then I realized two things: 1. The current President of the United States is a redhead (no?), and of the two political affiliations that would be most likely to have a problem with such derogatory phrases, the typically offended would also likely be unified in their dislike for the President, and therefore more willing to give this one a pass. And 2. This term seems to be more related to probability than anything else, because of the simple fact that redheads are rare.

Redheads are rare, and if neither you nor your husband, nor any of your other kids have red hair, well it sure looks like you've been shagging the mailman. Hence the two terms - redhead and stepchild - have a lot in common.

Lastly, it sure seems like this term, in its instantiation at turn-of-the-century America, would typically have been delivered with a curl of the lip (contemptuously), at least by the father of said stepchild, specifically because the Irish were heavily discriminated against AND they tended more to have red hair. AND they tended more to be mailmen.jk

Post Script:
The full phrase that puts this in perspective is "As welcome as a red-headed stepchild." It's not so much that the -child is unwelcome, just what they represent, which is adultery, and with someone of a lower class. And so really it's the mother of the child that is, or was, the target of disrepute. Nowadays, according to the way we typically hear it, the child is the target.

Notes:
Gene study unravels redheads mystery
Dec 2018, BBC

Pro Posteri

Everything gets old. Everything lives, dies,and then shits itself. Even the internet.

I had never heard of linkrot until today. However, I have always considered posterity and the preservation of information to be an important consideration and practice, be it for the creative individual, or the common cultural enthusiast alike.

As stated in the bio, this website is for the purpose of a personal content-addressable archive. This has already  become more useful as the internet, by way of your search results, transitions from a thing that looks the same for everyone to a thing that looks different depending on who you are.

Already feeds are tailored to your behavioral profile. Everything you see is alpha-beta'd to infinity. In common language, the United Airlines homepage looks way different depending on whether you're you or you're me.

That being said, boy was it a surprise to learn that someone out there had a way better and way more ambitious idea than me. They are the creators of the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, and they have way stronger devotion to posterity than I.

Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive gave a talk at the 2018 Online News Association conference, detailing this careful and insatiable machine that gorges on terabytes of our cultural data daily (via Ars Technica).

What's more exciting, that they're archiving physical things like vinyl records and microfeche, or that they're archiving the entire internet, everyday. What? They have robots that have repaired over 6 million pages lost to linkrot. They screenshot the Google homepage every ten minutes*.

Or is it more exciting to know they've been at it for 22 years? Has the internet even been aorund for 22 years?? (Yes. AOL remembers).

Great quote taken from Ars comments section:
The Internet Archive isn't trying to merely scrape the web. It's trying to ensure that we have a record of the past that we can rely on in the future. -source

We may not readily notice its effects in our daily lives, but we should appreciate nonetheless that such obsessive, compulsive behavior exists. Our world changes faster than we do as individuals, and our memories change even faster than that. Without an unconditionally comprehensive, enduring, and accessible repository of our cultural artifacts, it becomes too easy to perpetuate the failings of lessons we have already paid for.

You would think as the good consumerists, Americans would not stand for such highway robbery. Then again, according to the Internet Archives donations, many people recognize it as a fair deal.

*Fun fact: Stephen Wolfram (Alpha) also screenshots his desktop every ten minutes, and that's not the end of his compulsive archiving behaviors. I revered this guy, only a little, bit before I discovered this. Now he's in the pantheon.


Notes:
The Internet’s keepers? “Some call us hoarders—I like to say we’re archivists”
Oct 2018, Ars Technica

They even have video games for goodness sake! It's called the Internet Arcade.

They offer other services, like comparing side by side the same page at two different times, or architectural diagrams that show how a site's structure has changed over time.


Post Script:
NSFW - leave it to the comments section to remind us that we can use this to view vintage porn. Leave it to me to remind you if you are now on archive.org, fantasizing along with an adult film from 1998, of let's say a 25-year-old couple, consider that they are now 45 years old. That's not strong enough. Get a video from the 70's. Those actors are now over 70.
[comments section]

In Other Handwritten News

Can't unsee

Visa joins other major US credit card companies in getting rid of signatures
Jan 2018, The Verge

There's a local artist at my local cafe who signs the kiosk signpad with a different picture every time. Sometimes it's a duck, sometimes a sailboat. He doesn't care much for signatures.

I don't care much for signatures either. I wonder if every married couple has signed eachother's signatures on the check at a restaurant? I thought it was a common thing to do, until I tried it with a not-so-intimate partner and she got real mad at me. I apologized profusely, but in my mind I was like what the f is wrong w this chick, doesn't she know signatures don't really exist?? (I mean, you know, unless you're like Barack Obama, or Muhammad Ali.)


Anyway, it's official - signatures no longer exist.
And while we're at it, say goodbye to handwriting as we know it.
(And I'll always wonder if this has something to do with the rise of graffiti mid 2000's.)

Post Script

For what it's worth, check out this other blurb about fake font detectives and sports memorabilia signature experts:

Fake Fonts
Network Address, Oct 2017

On Science and Religion

Study finds beliefs about all-knowing gods fosters co-operation

Feb 2016, phys.org

The research, an international collaboration among anthropologists and psychologists, looked at how religion affects humans' willingness to co-operate with those outside their social circle.

I'm a strong believer that religion serves the purpose of large-scale human population cooperation, and that despite how much people (like myself even) think it instead today acts as a thought-smothering default state in response to difficult decision-making tasks, it has been, in the early development of human civilization, totally necessary for that development to take place, and that science (a kind of anti-religion) would not exist today had it not been for religion, and that the two are part of the same continuum of cultural evolution. This piece here is a good start for a more well-articulated discussion on the matter.

Seeing Red

(append to Cultural Evolution of Basic Color Terms)

Why Isn't the Sky Blue?
Radiolab [listen]

tl;dr: Homer was 'colorblind', as were most humans circa 0 BCE, and the only color they could see was red. Listen to the broadcast, taste the rainbow.

The joys of a comments page (archived for personal entertainment)...

CRAYONS
Nicolas Collignon from copenhagen
Before the modern period, Japanese had just one word, Ao, for both blue and green...In 1917, the first crayons were imported into Japan, and they brought with them a way of dividing a seamless visual spread into neat, discrete chunks. There were different crayons for green (midori) and blue (ao), and children started to adopt these names. But the real change came during the Allied occupation of Japan after World War II, when new educational material started to circulate. In 1951, teaching guidelines for first grade teachers distinguished blue from green, and the word midori was shoehorned to fit this new purpose.'
Jul. 25 2012 05:46 PM

JAPAN
chilidee
Yes, we do refer to the green light as the "blue light", and when the trees are full of very healthy green leaves, we say the trees are very blue. We see green and we have a word for green, but for certain items, we use the word blue, even when they are green...
Jun. 10 2012 03:02 AM

KOREA
NaYa
There's a Korean word that describes both green and blue as well, but it's the opposite of what was mentioned in the podcast as they're both considered 'bluish' instead of green. The five traditional colors are Black, White, Red, Yellow and Blue, and there is no native word that's specific for 'green.'
Apr. 09 2013 07:11 PM

RUSSIA
Tani from Canada
It's also interesting to me that Russian has two words for blue, ??????? (goluboi) which is light blue and ????? (sinii) which is dark blue, but they don't think of them as the same color, which of course is how English speakers think tend to think of them...
Oct. 05 2012 12:09 AM

NORSE
Misti Wudtke from Ohio
...while reading Snorri Sturluson's Edda, was struck by the description of the rainbow bridge Bifrost (called Bilrost in other sources):
"You must have seen it, maybe it is what you call the rainbow. It has three colours and great strength and is built with art and skill to a greater extent than other constructions..."...the same term was used both for blue and black...
Sep. 06 2012 01:22 PM

GAELIC
Clark from Newcastle Australia
In English we have plenty of Black, White, Brown, Grey and Green surnames, but there aren't a lot of Blues around. This topic interests me since my surname is derived from the Gaelic word 'gorm' for blue. However, when I looked into it, 'gorm' can mean blue or green.
Sep. 06 2012 01:22 PM

HEBREW
to from Raleigh
what is lapis lazuli and indigo? Two highly prized "blue" things of the ancient world.
Oct. 04 2012 12:34 PM
[response]
ultros from Oakland, CA
There are two blue-ish words used in the Hebrew: sappir (5601) and tekeleth (8504). Sappir is used almost exclusively in reference to the actual mineral sapphire or lapiz lazuli. It's often used in lists containing other minerals like diamond, turquoise, or chalcedony. Tekeleth is used almost exclusively to refer to dyed fabric. Misha's link to wikipedia gives a good explanation about how this is a very specific dye made from shellfish. As far as I can tell, neither the sky nor the ocean is ever called sappir or tekeleth.
Jun. 23 2012 06:31 PM
[^tl;dr]
Arlo from PDX
To those of you citing the blue things in the Hebrew Bible. The question at issue is not whether blue things appear, but that an actual word like blue is used to represent ALL blue things!
Jun. 07 2012 04:07 PM

SURFERS (and neolithic outdoorsmen)
glassgirl from seattle
when people are in the sun a long time (like surfers) their corneas go "yellow" and lose the ability to see purple and blue hues...the problem of ancient scholarly manuscripts - the author is most likely an adult and after years of exposure have gotten a yellow tint in their corneas and thus a filter that blocks blues and purples.
Jul. 18 2012 01:18 AM

THE TAKEAWAY
Elan' from Los Angeles, Ca.
And after you notice what blue looks like, what that color really is, you can't go back.
May 28 2012 09:51 PM

---

NOTES FROM DEUTSCHER
In response to the perplexing question of why the sky is called "black" in some cultures (p67-68): Perhaps qualities usually associated with black things such as "deep" voids or "empty" shadows are what make the bright blue sky "black" for these people.

Color Naming: The color of a thing in abstraction from the particular thing itself.
(p75)

Color-Making: The interest in color as an abstraction is likely to develop hand-in-hand with the artificial manipulation of colors, when color comes to be seen as detectable from a particular object. ... Blue is extrememly rare in nature and is very difficult to make...
(p92, referencing Gladstone)

POST SCRIPT
regarding the naming of colors/cultural evolution etc.:
"smells, unlike colors, do not have names of their own: they are always identified by what they are smells of."
-The Art Instinct, Denis Dutton, 2009, p211

NOTES
Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, 2011
Linguistic relativity and the color naming debate, link
Gladstone, W.E. (1858). Studies on Homer and the Homeric age. London: Oxford University Press.
William H. Durham, Coevolution: Genes, Culture and Human Diversity, 1991, link

Julian Jaynes’s Software Archaeology

Daniel Dennet, speaking on Julian Jaynes, ~1984
julianjaynes.org
[pdf]

main server, geocities.com, [link]
[source], Tree Maps, GDMAP tool

Now, I take Jaynes to be making a similarly exciting and striking move with regard to consciousness. To put it really somewhat paradoxically  you can’t have consciousness until you have the concept of consciousness. In fact he has a more subtle theory than that, but that’s the basic shape of the move.

These aren’t the only two phenomena, morality and consciousness, that work this way. Another one that Jaynes mentions is history, and at first one thinks. “Here’s another use-mention error!” At one point in the book Jaynes suggests that history was invented or discovered just a few years before Herodotus, and one starts to object that of course there was history long before there were historians, but then one realizes that in a sense Jaynes is right. Is there a history of lions and antelopes? Just as many years have passed for them as for us, and things have happened to them, but it is very different. Their passage of time has not been conditioned by their recognition of the transition, it has not been conditioned and tuned and modulated by any reflective consideration of that very process. So history itself, our having histories, is in part a function of our recognizing that very fact. Other phenomena in this category are obvious: you can’t have baseball before you have the concept of baseball, you can t have money before you have the concept of money.

archaeology software

I have used up as much time as I should use, but I am going to say a few more words. If you want to pursue the interesting idea that consciousness postdates the arrival of a certain set of concepts, then of course you have to have in your conceptual armamentarium the idea that concepts themselves can be preconscious, that concepts do not require consciousness. Many have
held that there is no such thing as the unconscious wielding of concepts, but Jaynes’ account of the origins of consciousness depends on the claim that an elaboration of a conceptual scheme under certain social and environmental pressures was the precondition for the emergence of consciousness as we know it. This is, to my mind, the most important claim that Jaynes makes in his book. As he puts it, “The bee has a concept of the flower,” but not a conscious concept. We
have a very salient theoretical role for something which we might as well call concepts, but if you
don’t like it we can call them schmoncepts, concept-like things that you don’t have to be conscious to have.

For instance, computers have them. They are not conscious—yet—but they have lots of concepts,...

[...]

archaeology software

The underlying hardware of the brain is just the same now as it was thousands of years ago (or it may be just the same), but what had to happen was that the environment had to be such as to encourage the development, the emergence, of certain concepts, certain software, which then set in motion some sort of chain reaction. Jaynes is saying that when the right concepts settled into place in the preconscious minds” of our ancestors, there was a sort of explosion. like the explosion in computer science that happens when you invent something like LISP. Suddenly you discover a new logical space. where you get the sorts of different behaviors, the sorts of new powers, the sorts of new problems that we recognize as having the flavor of human consciousness.

Of course, if that is what Jaynes’ theory really is, it is no wonder he has to be bold in his interpretation of the tangible evidence, because this isn't just archaeology he is doing: this is software archaeology, and software doesn't leave much of a fossil record. Software, after all, is just concepts. It is abstract and yet, of course, once it is embodied it has very real effects. So if you want to find a record of major “software” changes in archaeological history, what are you going to have to look at? You are going to have to look at the “printouts,” but they are very indirect. You are going to have to look at texts, and you are going to have to look at the pottery shards and figurines as Jaynes does, because that is the only of course, maybe the traces are just gone, maybe the “fossil record” is simply not good enough. Jaynes’ idea is that for us to be the way we are now, there has to have been a revolution— almost certainly not an organic revolution, but a software revolution—in the organization of our information processing system, and that has to have come after language. That, I think, is an absolutely wonderful idea, and if Jaynes is completely wrong in the details, that is a darn shame,
but something like what he proposes has to be right; and we can start looking around for better modules to put in the place of the modules that he has already given us.
www.julianjaynes.org/pdf/dennett_jaynes-software-archeology.pdf

Our Blue Marble

Kazimir Malevich's Black Square 1915

An example of Abstract Art, specifically from the Suprematism movement. It can easily be called the most extreme example of artistic abstraction.

Recently, I was trying to convey the meaning, or at least the relevance of the Black Square to my high school art students. Most people don't understand abstract art, and that's part of what it is,if you want to see it that way - another esoteric tool used by the elite to alienate a people from their own culture. But I like to see art, any art, as simply a reflection of a time and of the mind of a people at a particular time in history. Art is a kind of coping mechanism for society; the society as a whole will call a thing Art if it serves that purpose - to help us to cope with a world we do not understand. Needless to say, as anyone who would try to explain abstract art to group of high school students in a single 45-minute presentation, I was successful only in getting them upset enough to debate with me for 45 mintutes about the ridiculousness of the Black Square.

The Blue Marble is a famous photograph of the Earth, taken on December 7, 1972, by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft. The photograph was taken about 5 hours and 6 minutes after launch of the Apollo 17 mission. To the astronauts, Earth had the appearance and size of a glass marble, hence the name.

The Apollo 17 image, however, released during a surge in environmental activism during the 1970s, was acclaimed by the wide public as a depiction of Earth's frailty, vulnerability, and isolation amid the vast expanse of space. NASA archivist Mike Gentry has speculated that The Blue Marble is the most widely distributed image in human history. [link]

Later that night, I thought to myself about the Blue Marble, or rather what I call the Blue Marble Syndrome. I was born in 1980, and so for me, I never lived in a world where man had -not- been to outerspace. This achievement had already taken place well before I was born, and so it never hit me; it was always there. From what I understand through reading history, this image changed not only the lives of the countless individuals who saw it for the first time, but it changed the consciousness of an entire society (as mentioned in the caption above). And I made the parallel - my students couldn't feel the true impact, the true relevance of the Black Square, because they weren't around for its inception.

The next day, I tried explaining this to them. No use. (Back to the more concrete and perhaps practical exercise of distinguishing the difference between representationality and non-representationality in visually-informed art).

And then it happened. Granted, I had been following Curiosity. I stayed up that night like a little kid in utter amazement, but almost a bit moreso at the fact that the entire world was watching along with me, all of us, with the entire crew at NASA, in real time (and at the implications of that superimposed on the idea of the timelag between here and Mars) feeling the same every bit of anxiety, both the good kind and the bad kind, as everyone else. It landed, and it was over. Some months later, I was scrolling through some feeds, and I came across this picture (below), and it stopped me dead in my tracks, and I literally could not take my eyes off of it for a good five minutes; in a very real way, it transported me to another world (superimposed on the fact that it -is- another world I'm looking at) and it took away from me, for those moments, my own thoughts.

I still can't get over it. Neither the image, nor its implications, nor the experience it forced upon me.

Curiosity Self Portrait on Mars February 2013 Image Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Taken in the Yellowknife Bay region of Mars' Gale Crater, the panoramic image was stitched together by NASA from a series of 130 images created in the first week of February by the rover's 34-millimeter Mast camera and Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI). [The MAHLI frames used to create Curiosity's self-portrait exclude sections that show the arm itself and so MAHLI and the robotic arm are not seen.] 

interactive version

As I'm sure any student of history and art and culture is wont to do, I have spent many daydream-hours lamenting over why I am alive now and not then. Why couldn't I hear Jimi Hendrix turn his guitar into a human-robot voice. Why couldn't I hear Neil Armstrong speak to us from a place that is not Earth. And why couldn't I see that picture of my own planet and feel the same sense of fragility, of isolation, and all the myriad emotions and thoughts that came with it.

It's not that I will no longer lament over being alive today and not yesterday. But I have certainly found comfort in this: Everyone of us, eventually, will be given our own Blue Marble.

The Ampersand, &

AKA The 27th Letter

(basically just reposting Wikipedia)

This is a false-reveal of the ampersand conflation. The E and T are visible, but the implied origin, sans-stylization, is misleading in regards to the actual evolution of the ampersand character.

The Thing, SEEN

Ampersand - '&'. It means ‘and’, a -conjunction- of things. It means ‘to combine’, or more like a command to the reader to combine.

Visually, this symbol ‘&’ is a conflation of the letters ‘e’ and ‘t’, for the Latin et, or ‘and’. Firstly, it was joined to form a simple ligature, or combination of letters typically-found-together. But it further underwent a strange evolution under the influence of, primarily, scribes, typographers and typesetting technology. These people/things would abbreviate, combining letters together (like the ‘ae’ in aesthetics) to save time, space, and money. And it was under these conditions that the hyper-stylization of the letter/s-form gave it a life of its own, the combination having reached a point where the constituent letters could no longer be distinguished from each other. This is what makes a conflation.

&, The 27th Letter

via: http://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/112/

source: My Own Primer, or First Lessons in Spelling and Reading. Carter, Rev. John  P. // Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1857

The Word, SPOKEN

As a word, ampersand is also a conflation. It was originally spoken/written as and per se and (which in itself is a combination of English-Latin-English, the Latin part of which, per se, means ‘in itself’…you can’t make this stuff up). The other word-letters of the alphabet were spoken I per se and A per se, and they were said that way to distinguish them as letters and not words (though their very distinguishing in this way made them words more than letters, in fact).

This time, it was through the copying mechanism of human speech that the ampersand was carried over multiple iterations, themselves being reinforced in children reciting the alphabet, and ending with ‘and’, the 27th letter, spoken ‘and per se and’, to distinguish it as a letter of the alphabet and not a word – andperseand became slurred and stuttered by its countless iterations until a stable ‘ampersand’ was reached. It doesn’t make any kind of sense how it got there; it is a conflation in this as well as its visual expression.

The Wrestling Ampersand

The Idea, UNDERSTOOD

Slightly sideways now; the ampersand, both the word, and its symbol, stand for a combination of things – they are a combination and they stand for a combination. It’s put together like an abstract life form. It’s just uncanny how the ampersand’s meaning is inherent in its form. It’s completely artificial, and completely beautiful, and who designed it?

And so finally, the most triumphant expression of this thing is in our understanding of it. A mental-pretzeling, we wrestle with its recursions and meta-logic diversions. It is the expression of a mind trying to understand itself.

Post Script, AMPERSAND OVERDOSE

notice the ampersand variations

image: Nobiltà di dame […] Fabritio Caroso. Venetia. 1600.

via History:

"...different kinds were used to keep the page from blurring under the reader's eyes"; too many &'s on the page is hypnotic.

Artemy Lebedev, Ampersand, § 112. March 22, 2005

via Russia:

"Finding any mention of the sign in the pre-computer era literature is nearly impossible, because the use of ampersand in Cyrillic typesetting was very scant."

"There’s no need to use ampersand in Russian.

Because the Russian conjunction u (and) sounds and looks short enough (with “y”, the Spanish [and 'e' in Spanish and Portuguese] are the luckiest of the bunch). The author can’t recall an example when one intelligible and condensed symbol is replaced with a few symbols or even just a ligature."

Artemy Lebedev, Ampersand, § 112. March 22, 2005

via France:

Esperluette means 'ampersand' in French,

but they really call it 'le sign et', like how English calls '@' 'the at symbol'.

(I am only reading the French-wiki via 'translate', and what a nightmare it is to translate this particular topic.)

try translating to english and reading the discussion page

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperluette

Esperluette underwent not identical but very similar development in France. Perhaps this can be a focus for studying the relative speed of idea-transmission at particular points in cultural evolution. Had printed writing been so prevalent in an older England/France as it is now, then the word for the thing-ampersand would not have been able to morph so easily.

Now it is fixed. If, for some reason, we were to incorporate 'theisthe' into our language today in the 21st century, it would not mutate the same (especially since the 'letter of the alphabet' for 'th' is no longer used)  However, it isn't used  in many other languages, examples given below. 

via Legend:

one appears in Pompeian graffiti, establishing the symbol at least as far back as A.D. 79 (we can just take this as legend).

via the Internet:

"Our Middle Name", 28 April, 2008

News, Notes, & Observations, Hoefler & Frere-Jones

http://www.typography.com/ask/showBlog.php?blogID=98

The Ampersand, an ampersand blog

http://ampersand.gosedesign.net

J. Tschichold and F. Plaat, The Ampersand: Its origin and development, London: Woudhuysen, 1957. <http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/721129570> Bibtex

The [Visual] Evolution of the Ampersand

http://blog.visheshk.net/2011/06/the-evolution-of-the-ampersand/

FINAL NOTE, not for the faint of heart:

try writing an article such as this, and switching back and forth between 'HTML' and 'Compose' and watch what happens to all the &'s.

___

^You've never seen the ABCs look this bizarre and wonderful
Vincze Miklós io9
Feb 14, 2014