And then, sometime around twenty thousand years ago, the temperature started to climb again, and all that ice began to melt. With water pouring off the glaciers and ice caps and out of every swollen delta, the sea began to rise. It mounted steadily over low-lying coastal areas and flowed up through the mouths of rivers, drowning them beneath the ocean. In the Mid-Atlantic, four of those rivers—today called the York, the James, the Susquehanna, and the Rappahannock—had long converged on the same spot. Drawn downward by gravity, they emptied out into the remains of an ancient crater, one cut so deep into the planet’s crust that not even thirty-five million years of slurry and sediment compacting on top of it could bring it level with the surrounding land. When the ice melted and the sea rose up, it followed the course carved by those rivers, flooding the land above what is known, today, as the Chesapeake Bay impact crater.
The meteorite helped dictate its location, and the rising ocean filled it with water, but it was the existence of a peninsula just to the east that made the Chesapeake a bay. When it first began taking shape, nearly two million years ago, that peninsula was just a narrow barrier spit, its eastern face turned to the full force of the sea. Over the ensuing millennia, ocean levels fluctuated, alternately depositing silt on the spit to elongate it when the waters ran high and, when they dropped, exposing a broader swath of the land, a swampy composite of sand and gravel and peat and clay. Wind and wave kept on shaping it, adding and eroding, washing up and scouring away. Off its coast, small islands emerged and vanished, then reemerged, like diving birds, in new places.
Only about three thousand years ago did the peninsula assume its current shape, curling like a comma off the coast of mainland America. Although it is just a hundred and seventy miles long from top to tail, it has over twelve thousand miles of shoreline, more than the entire West Coast of the United States. All along its own western edge, the land goes fractal, the main peninsula spawning smaller ones, their elaborately scalloped edges eddying into the bay. Just beyond those, where the contest between land and water reaches a temporary draw, islands dot the bay—Poplar Island and Carpenter Island, Smith and St. George and Solomons and dozens more. Out on the very tip of one of those, just beyond a little fishing village, the land narrows to a point, water surrounding it on three sides. Egrets and herons stalk the shallows all around it, slender as the reeds that hide them. Below them, broken bits of shell shift with the sand, and smooth round rocks shine upward through the water like wishes in a well. On sunny days, diamonds of light from the waves slosh in and out of the shade from the willows and walnut trees lining the shore, forming a wide dappled edge where one element meets another and where, one beautiful May afternoon, C. and I got married.
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Languages, like landmasses, change shape over time. Until the late nineteenth century, the final character of the English alphabet was not the letter Z but a word: “and.” That word was written—on countless slates and blackboards and grade school primers—as “&,” so that the whole sequence looked like this:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z &
The twenty-seventh of those symbols dates back to ancient Rome, when scribes, resorting to cursive to write more rapidly, linked the two letters in “εt,” the Latin word for “and.” You can still make out those letters today in certain fancier versions of the character, like this one:
&
As Latin took hold throughout Christendom, becoming the dominant and in some cases the only written language, the “&” spread along with it. When Latin eventually receded (thanks in part to Dante with his vernacular poetry, Gutenberg with his vernacular printing, and Martin Luther with his vernacular preaching), its script was left behind, complete with the “&”—a kind of philological fossil, still written as the Roman scribes had done but pronounced in whatever way the locals said “and.”
It makes sense that this stray character got appended to the English alphabet. Students had to learn to read and write it, after all, and it was at least as tricky to form as R or Z. The fact that it represents an entire word was hardly disqualifying; so can A and I and even O (as in “O Come, All Ye Faithful” and “O death, where is thy sting?”). But the “&” did present a unique problem. If you recite the alphabet with it stuck to the end, as schoolchildren across the English-speaking world were routinely required to do, you sound as if you are leaving your listener hanging: “…X, Y, Z, and.” And what? It’s not true, no matter what old-fashioned grammarians might tell you, that you shouldn’t start a sentence with “and,” but ending something that way is a different story. To solve this problem, students were taught to use the Latin phrase per se, meaning “in itself,” to indicate that they meant the character, not the word. Thus instead of saying “X, Y, Z, and,” they dutifully said, “X, Y, Z, and per se and”—a phrase that, over time, grew blurry from repetition. It is our language, then, that turned the Latin “&” into the ampersand.
It is not clear exactly when “and” migrated out of the alphabet, although it was probably hastened along by a music publisher in Boston named Charles Bradlee, who, in 1835, appropriated a Mozart piano variation, availed himself of the English alphabet for lyrics, and proceeded to make an enduring hit with the under-seven set. Bradlee’s version ended at Z, which was either a cause or an effect (or both) of the gradual disappearance of “&” from the English alphabet. Today, typesetters and font designers regard the ampersand not as a letter but as punctuation, and the rest of us regard “and” as only a word. Yet there is something apt about its former status as part of the alphabet—a covert acknowledgment of how early we learn it and how much we need it, how elemental it is to the ways we think and speak.
That importance begins with the role that “and” plays as a kind of linguistic superglue, capable of binding together almost anything. You probably remember from grade school that it is a conjunction—a coming together, a way of joining two or more things. Dozens of other words also serve that purpose, including but, yet, for, nor, before, after, because, although, if, so, once, since, until, unless, while, whereas, and whenever. Almost all of these other conjunctions reveal something about the relationship between the things that are being joined. Some of them link a cause to its effect: “We talked all afternoon, so I was late getting home.” Others set up a contrast or exception: “We talked all afternoon, yet still had more to say”; “We talked all night but did not touch.” Others present a rationale: “I couldn’t bear to leave, for I found her fascinating.” Others indicate an arrangement in space or time: “She called me after she got home”; “I accompanied her wherever she went.” Others offer an alternative: “We could go for a walk or go to a movie.” And still others introduce a contingency: “I will come for dinner if you are free”; “I will stay unless you want me to go.”