Norfolk History

New Book: "Mississippi River Valley: The Course of American Civilization" from Iowa State Univ Press, now FREE for download iastatedigitalpress.com/plug… @IowaStateU @IowaStateUNews @IowaPublicRadio @americanrivers @UMNIonE @ASEH_org @OpenRiversUMN @mnhs @ILhistory @ILNewsProject

We are expecting hot, humid conditions with heat indices over 100°F for a large part of the area today. It will be highest in the southeast, where a Heat Advisory has been issued.

A county fair champion from Virginia shares one of her most popular recipes—a peanut butter fudge: ow.ly/2Izj50PqaW4

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.

Explore Virginia's 41 state parks with a Nature Backpack! Each one includes free entry/parking into the parks, flora and fauna guides, a magnifying lens, a dip net, and a port-a-bug field observation container! View availability here: bit.ly/3seNBKf ⛰️🔍🐛🌸

Rip currents are dangerous for swimmers but also ecologically important – here's how scientists are working to understand these 'rivers of the sea' bit.ly/3pQbSuF

WHO expert cancer group states that the sweetener aspartame is a possible carcinogen, but evidence is limited – 6 questions answered bit.ly/3K7PUKm

757 Accelerate announced its next batch of seven startups aiming to learn and grow in its intensive 12-week program. trib.al/b94uV7X