Tim Ray
1K posts
@mgzeuthen @numbersguypdx @portlandgeneral Nice to see the overall results above. We turned off the ac. Happy to know it helped!
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On Monday, the hottest day on record for the month of August in Portland, PGE customers took actions that helped service reliability by reducing power demand by approximately 90 megawatts (MW).
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What the hell is an ampersand and why does it look like that?!
The first thing you need to know is that "&" used to be the 27th letter of the alphabet...
But there are three parts to this story. And the first begins over two thousand years ago in Ancient Rome with a single word: et. It's the Latin for "and". At some point Roman scribes started combining the two letters of et into a single symbol, which was the ancestor of our modern &.
The earliest example of the "et" symbol is actually from graffiti in Pompeii. In any case, it did not disappear with the fall of the Roman Empire.
Latin survived as the language of the Catholic Church and of scholarship in Medieval Europe. Scribes during the Dark Ages continued to use the & symbol. It evolved down the centuries, in places losing any semblance of the letters e and t whatsoever.
The second part of the story is that during the 18th and 19th centuries, as education and the teaching of literacy spread, & was added to the end of the alphabet as a sort of 27th letter.
On a related note, although "et cetera" is now usually just abbreviated as etc., for a long time it was instead abbreviated as "&c". The & was for et and the c for cetera.
The third and final part of the story is about how the alphabet was taught to children — and how it was read out loud.
As this 1822 Glossary of Words and Phrases explains, it had been normal during the Renaissance, when speaking the alphabet, to add "per se" before any letter which could also be a word on its own — "per se" means "by itself" in Latin.
Take the letter A, which can also be a word of its own. When reading out the alphabet people would say "A, per se A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, per se I..." and so on. O was also considered a word of its own.
Which means, when people got to the end of the alphabet, with & being the 27th letter, they would say: "S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, and per se &."
When this old way of reading the alphabet was taught to children in the 18th century and they were reciting it aloud, they would garble "and per se " into what eventually became... ampersand.
A Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English from 1905 relates some of the many other pronunciations school children apparently came up with:
"Ampersand. The sign &; ampersand. Variants: Ann Passy Ann; anpasty; andpassy; anparse; apersie; per-se; ampassy; am-passy-ana; ampene-and; ampus-and; ampsyand; ampazad; amsiam; ampus-end; apperse-and; empersiand; amperzed; and zumzy-zan."
Well, of all the many pronunciations that might have stuck, it was "ampersand" which came to be accepted and is now the official name for &... rather than zumzy-zan. So, from hurried Roman scribes to unruly school children, that's where "&" came from.
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Tim Ray retweetledi
@Bimala_Rose Hey Bimala!! How are you?? We just had our BHS 30 year reunion! DM me when you can, ok?
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Best #birthdaypresent ever!
Me: it’s time for bed- you have school in morning
Son: I’m off tomorrow
Me: Yes!!!!!!!! I don’t have to wake at 6am on my bday to take you to school!!!!!!
And I like cats and dancing 😊
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@sherrilee77 @78cp @matthewjdowd Fox News, conservative radio, and many other outlets that push this agenda of fear and hate.
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What is the most over-engineered feature you've ever seen in a car?
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@Dadsaysjokes Nothing in the English language starts with an ‘n’ and ends with a ‘g’. 🤣
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The H. Moser & Cie. Streamliner Tourbillon Vantablack is made entirely of Vantablack material, which absorbs 99.96% of the visible light, making it appear invisible against a dark background
[📹 highsnobiety: buff.ly/3RzCzx7]
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@BrittanyFalkers Snow Dog Rocky. 🐶❄️ Photo taken on January 12, 2017, in our backyard in Hillsboro.
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Share a photo from winters past! I'll feature your frigid snowy photos tonight at 7 on #KGWTheGoodStuff.
My friend Alison and I hiked Mirror Lake Trail near Mt. Hood a year ago this week. Such a beautiful hike!
Portland, OR 🇺🇸 English
@engineers_feed Most people are shocked when they find out how incompetent I am as an electrician. ⚡️🤣
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6 of the most common electrical issues in the home:
1. Overloaded Circuits
A circuit overload occurs when too many appliances are plugged into the same circuit.
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