&

I followed the 2008 US Presidential elections very closely and in the process became a keen student of Obama's speaking style.

The one word he uses most frequently and with the greatest of emphasis is "and". He uses it not as an conjunction that appeared mid-sentence but the beginning of a new sentence, a new thought that is not so much a conjunction with the previous thought but an extension or an expansion into another idea sphere.

He was therefore not saying "&" but "and". Let me explain.

Children in traditional schools in England recite "&" as the 27th letter in the alphabet and it is the belief that the representation "ampersand" is a corruption of what they would say "and per se  &" with "per se" being the phrase that signified that a letter can, like A and I, form a word on its won.

The Americans, more specifically Hollywood (when I was much younger I used to feel that instead of Hollywood being an American institution, America was a Hollywood institution. In fact I got into trouble for opining thus to a big shot from the US head office of the ad agency that I worked in. But I digress) has given "&" a much greater significance. In Hollywood an "&" between two collaborators signified a close partnership while the verbosity of an "and" signified an at-a-distance almost cold working relationship. So it is Laurel & Hardy and perhaps it should have been "Charlie and Chaplin" given the man's schizophrenic nature.

Therefore if one where to transcribe say George Bush's speeches (uh?) one would surely write "&" every single time he spoke the word "and". Given that the man was congenitally incapable of any extension and expansion of thought.

In the late nineties, I with another partner started an ad agency. We wanted to name it AB&U with A and B standing for the two of us and U standing for the consumer. A reputed astrologer and numerologist who was a good friend of the other partner persuaded us that it was in our interest to be a bit more verbose and the agency ended up being called ABandU. The agency did reasonably well for many years but the "and" in the name had it's say in the end, alienating the agency from it's marketplace ( I must add that my ex-partner continues to flourish in advertising and I continue to make a living in a related field).

And.. finally let me conclude with a deeper observation. To me the difference between "&" and "and"  is further illuminated by two creative processes. "&" is the "stream of consciousness" process where the artist or the writer flows with her consciousness to create. And "and" is the process of "second attention" when the artist or writer stands at a distance from his consciousness and observes it. I could go on about "streams of consciousness" and "second attention" (or is it "streams of consciousness" & "second attention") but that is material for another post. Au revoir.