The Great Dictator

"Lali, do you have your pad nearby?" I looked up from the excruciatingly bad book I was trying to read and said yes. "Just jot something down for me, will you? I don't want to go to my computer now." I was glad to put the book aside. I picked up my pad and pen.

"Aitch en ess en ampersand."
"Um. Honey, is it capitals or lower case?"
"It doesn't matter. Transliterate in Telugu if you want, just jot it down, okay?"

Jotting down gobbledygook isn't easy. It is always easier to take dictation when you can make sense of it. But Missus Em is intrepid, so I wrote it down.

"Larrow."
"What?"
"Larrow. It means left arrow. This is LaTeX, Lali"
"Oh. Okay, larrow."

You see? How can you write down stuff you don't understand?

"Larrow hyphen tee ampersand."
I dutifully jotted that down.

"Aitch en arpeeyen arrow dash dee ampersand."
"Ampersand, ampersand. You have ampersands on your brain, honey."
"Ampersands mark out columns, Lali."
"Reminds me of the Lulu song, " I said. "Ampersand ampersand when you are near, ampersand ampersand loud in my ear, pounding away pounding away won't you be mine, ampersand I love you." I sang.

"Stop that," he said sternly. "This is serious. Aitch en minus one arpeeyen ampersand," he went on. I sighed and wrote that down.

"Dots."
"Dots?"
"Yes, dots."
"You don't say ellipsis?"
"No. Dots."
"Okay, dots."

It is funny how those three dots, the ellipsis has changed. An ellipsis is omission of some kind, an auxiliary verb instead of the full form, or omitted text in a quote. But nowadays it is used to indicating trailing off and incomplete sentences.

"Arrow hyphen dee aitch zero arpeeyen ampersand."
"Ampersand again, here we go."
"Oh, maybe not ampersand. Just hold on."
"Make up your mind, honey."
"Yeah. Ampersand."
"Okay, ampersand."

"Make that aitch zero."
"That's what I wrote. Do you mean one?"
"Don't be funny. Aitch zero arpeeyen line break. Scratch that ampersand out."
"Why? I am rather enjoying writing ampersands. I never wrote this many before."
"It's not necessary, that's why."

"What was that about? What did we achieve?"
"We have achieved a diagram."
"Really? Ampersands galore in that, then?"
"Yeah. Paul Taylor wrote this diagrams dot style package for LaTeX, to produce commutative diagrams. A really useful thing."

"If you say so. I am going to blog about this, you know?"
"Bah. What will you call the post?" He scoffed.
"Ampersand I love you, of course!"

Cheers!