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What's the story behind our massive repitition of ./foo and cd ... Where do these two . and .. come from? Where could they be seen as a way of navigating a file system tree for the first time?
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What is an &? & is called an ampersand symbol (pronounced “AM- per-sand”). Essentially, it means “and”. It is used both (a) in the body of the paper as part of a citation and (b) at the end of the paper as part of a reference.
The ⁊ was developed before & appeared, by Cicero's enslaved secretary Tiro, who'd developed a shorthand system himself called the notae Tironianae. This system included at its peak over 13,000 symbols, though most fell out of use around 1100 CE.
Etymology. The term ampersand is a corruption of and (&) per se and, which literally means "(the character) & by itself (is the word) and." The symbol & is derived from the ligature of ET or et, which is the Latin word for "and."
Conjunction. A conjunction (also called a connective) is a word such as and, because, but, for, if, or, and when. Conjunctions are used to connect phrases, clauses, and sentences. The two main kinds are known as coordinating conjunctions and subordinating conjunctions.
Excerpt from an interview with Ken Thompson (9-6-89):
Every time we made a directory, by convention we put it in another directory called directory - directory, which was dd. Its name was dd and that all the users directories and in fact most other directories, users maintain their own directory systems, had pointers back to dd, and dd got shortened into ‘dot-dot,’ and dd was for directory-directory.
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