TORONTO – A 76-page report released by the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education has revealed that “every last one” of the ampersands created by hand in Canada has been drawn incorrectly.
“As we all know – or, at least, as I thought we all knew – you have to start at the bottom-right, draw a straight line to the top-left, loop to make a symmetrical line, and then loop back up the other way to construct the proper ampersand,” said Calista Zahl, head of the research group at OISE. “However, we found that exactly 0% of the population follows this prescription, instead starting at the bottom left, and then doing whatever gol-darn pleases them.”
“They know something’s off too,” Zahl wrote. “Because 96% of our study group tilted their head & asked, ‘Does this ampersand look right to you?’ after completing their task.”
Zahl attributes this widespread disregard for orthographic precision to the emergence of keyboards, which she also blames for people’s inability to make the ‘at’, percent, and dollar signs look like anything but treble clefs, no matter how hard they concentrated.
“Technology can certainly be implicated in this finding,” said Zahl. “But it can’t explain everything. For example, why people tend to get their own signatures wrong every time.”
At press time, the nation was doodling ampersands for practice, but will doubtlessly screw them up the next time it has to draw them.
