Longtime reader and exquisite barometer of grammar Miss Leyla Bandy recently wrote in about the ampersand. "Is it ever okay to use two &s in the same phrase?" she wondered.

The short answer is no, not really, but ad copy folks do stuff like that all the time.

But the query sparked some musings on the ampersand and its Latin relatives. And of course, there are always questions about our very own Barnes & Noble and barnesandnoble.com

What gives with that ampersand, et al.?

One of my favorite writers is Alain de Botton, whose books on Proust and travel have quickly become classics among connoisseurs of language and thought. His most recent title, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, is a Barnes & Noble recommendation. And the mini-review of it here, on barnesandnoble.com, is titled "The Pleasures & Sorrows of Work." Hmm.

Alain de Botton's exquisite book is not about ampersands, per se, but explaining such things is certainly part of the pleasures of my work.

So what exactly IS an ampersand? When and how do we use it?

A small clue is "per se"; the ampersand arose from the Latin phrase "et per se," meaning "and, by itself." It was used at the end of the alphabet to indicate that those letters were letters, and some were also words, such as "A" and "I" by themselves, so alphabet lists were often traditionally said ending with the words "et per se and."

The word "et" was turned into the symbol & when the strokes that formed the letters "e" and "t" were joined. (Such joining of letters is known as a ligature and can be seen today in some fonts when the letters "f" and "l" or "i" occur next to each other, for instance.)

So the "et" became & and the phrase "andperseand" was slurred into the word "ampersand." Voilà! We have &, the ampersand, which became a symbol for "and."

Whether or not it is proper to use the & symbol in anything other than a brand name, such as Barnes & Noble et al., at this point is very questionable. Certainly, corporate logos, trademarked brand names, and so on use it as a means of distinguishing themselves, but almost all style manuals will advise against its use in Standard Edited American English.

And what about other Latin abbreviations in English, such as et al. and i.e., e.g.?

Well, for "et al." once again we have "et" meaning "and" as well as "al." The "al" gets a period because it is an abbreviation for "alii" (masculine), "aliae" (feminine), or "alia" (gender neutral). All those als mean "others."

Thus, "et al." means "and others" just as et cetera means "and the rest," and is abbreviated "etc." And "e.g." means "ex gratia," or "for example."

Finally, "i.e." is short for "id est," or "that is." It's used when you could say "in other words," and "e.g." is used when you can say "for example." One more note: "etc." and "et al." have slightly different meanings in legal works but are pretty much interchangeable, except in terms of tone, in everyday life.

The pleasures of this work are many, not the least of which is a chance to use my Latin.

And so, what about those alia? Other questions about other abbreviations or punctuation symbols, from Latin or otherwise, will gladly be answered here!