*The Tragical Death of a Apple-Pye* (ca. 1793–1796) — The Public Domain Review

Evans’ edition was published in the late eighteenth century — reworking a primer by Richard Marshall from the 1760s — but The Tragical Death of a Apple Pye is perhaps an even older story, first published, according to some scholars, in 1671. For a modern reader, it preserves English paleography as it existed in an earlier state: across the sections, U and V are used interchangeably, like I and J, and “&” is the ultimate letter, after Z. In an attempt to offset the ampersand’s semiotic difference, teachers well into the nineteenth century instructed students to pronounce the final letters of the alphabet as “x, y, z, and per se &”, hiving off the ampersand with the Latin by itself. “Especially bored pupils would not so much recite as slur the [alphabet’s] final syllables”, writes Keith Houston in Shady Characters, “and from this verbal mangling the ‘letter’ & gained a dazzling variety of slang names.” 1905’s Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English, for example, collects a variety of schoolboy cant for the zaftig glyph: “Ann Passy Ann”, “And-pussy-and”, “empersiand”, “amperzed”, and “zumzy-zan”. Despite “ampersand” having a secondary meaning as “the posteriors” in this dictionary, there is little caloric density afforded to the character in the “Curious Discourse”. Coming at the tail end of the alphabet — and thus getting the dregs of dessert distribution — the ampersand must content itself with merely “lick[ing] the dish”.