Subject: Re: The latest searches<br/>
Date: Jul 06, 2003 @ 21:53<br/>
Author: acroorca2002 (&quot;acroorca2002&quot; &lt;orc@...&gt;)<br/>
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<div id="ygrps-yiv-443617359">--- In <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="mailto:BoundaryPoint@yahoogroups.com">BoundaryPoint@yahoogroups.com</a>, &quot;Lowell G. McManus&quot; <br/>
&lt;mcmanus71496@m...&gt; wrote:<br/>
<blockquote><span title="ireply"> &gt; Acroorca wrote:<br/>
&gt; <br/>
&gt; &gt; even tho i myself dont normally go in for any spots or marks <br/>
&gt; &gt; beyond the 27 letters of the basic shakespearean alphabet<br/>
&gt; <br/>
&gt; Huh?  I count 26!  Are you also counting &quot;&&quot;?<br/>
<br/>
 </span></blockquote>yes of course<br/>
<br/>
shakespeare & elizabethans generally did indeed count the <br/>
ampersand as a letter of the alphabet<br/>
tho it was strictly a lower case letter then & not yet an upper <br/>
owing to its humble origins<br/>
<br/>
in addition <br/>
or rather subtraction<br/>
since less is more in this case<br/>
it is thought that the bard himself never used the upper case <br/>
form of any letters <br/>
but only these 27 lower case forms & no others<br/>
tho it is true his typositors & illustrators added initial block caps <br/>
to his manuscripts<br/>
<br/>
& the ampersand itself only began to get promoted to the upper <br/>
register much later on<br/>
indeed not until the 19th century <br/>
with the introduction of the standard typewriter keyboard <br/>
but by then it had ceased to be recognized as a letter of any case</div>