On 3/6/06, Sally Caves <scaves@...> wrote:
> This is far more infuriating: the use of the comma to mean "and" in American
> newspaper headlines.
Huh. That's never bothered me; I just automatically translate it from
"headlinish". Is that really a recent change? It seems like
headlines have read that way my whole life. Which is admittedly
shorter than the lives of some folks on this list, but I have been
reading newspapers for 25+ years.
> What happened to the old ampersand? Just too difficult to get in all those
> squiggles? Are we that hard pressed (so to speak) for paper?
It does seem to have fallen out of use. About the only ampersands I
see anymore are in HTML entities, or between parameters in a URL query
string - and even in that use seems to have been largely replaced by
a semicolon.
--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>