It's actually a rendering of 'etc.'. '&' is 'Et'. I know Nokia's corporate font always used to have an ampersand which was clearly a ligature of the two letters, for example, similar in proportions to the second step in the following:
'Et alii/aliae/alia' are 'and others'; 'etc.' is 'and the rest'. Thus repeated etc.'s are redundant.
Phil
*sigh* the failings of modern education.
The ampersand symbol is derived from 'et'. as in 'et cetera'. If you look _closely_ at one, you'll even see where the 't' is crossed on the stroke that goes up-right from the bottom of the figure.
Care to guess what the 'C' stands for?
This is a _standard_ abbreviation in older writing.
*
I'd guess it stands for cetera, which would give us "and so forth".
Rob
&c is a short-hand abbreviation for et cetera.
scott
puzzle is what popped up in my mind.
Think of the tanks in "tank farms" -- where a bunch of fuel tanks are kept in a large compound -- the kind where the tank trucks go to fill up prior to delivering to the local fuel stations.
Nope -- it is for fuel tanks -- serious sized ones.
That is how it is used -- but for fuel oil or gasoline.
Not sure that I would lower a steel tape into a water well -- even assuming that the light could shine far enough down a well pipe.
Enjoy, DoN.
Such a cluttered page, took forever to find what you were referencing-- reproduced here for convenience:
"A sign over a fireplace mantle in New Hampshire has this puzzle on it. I saw it in a charming old Inn while having dinner with friends in the late '70's, and it caught my eye. The last line seemed clear enough, but how about the rest?
If the BMT put more : If the B . putting : Never put more : over a - der You'd be an * it
So I scribbled it down, and when I got home tried to figure it out. Turned out that the terminology was kind of archaic, but then it was a puzzle from some word-playing "Yankee" made up over a hundred years ago. At first it's harder than it looks. Eventually it dawns on you what it's all about. Simple stuff, and kind of corny, too. Think of where the sign is located, near the grate of a roaring fireplace, where strangers might have helped out fueling the flames-- IF they knew their English!"
Answering your question, it's a two letter word which has 28 separate meanings in contemporary English. homophonic with the name for a 3 letter insect.
spoiler follows
"If the grate be empty, put more coal on. If the grate be full, stop putting more coal on. Never put more coal on over a - der You'd be an ass to risk` it
'-' has me stumped so far -- should work out to something like 'hot cin(der)' I _think_. can't make 'dash', or 'hyphen' fit
"B" -> (archaic for upper case) "Great B" -> grate be ":" -> "colon' -> coal on ".' -> (older _British_ usage) "full stop" -> full, stop "*" -> "asterisk" -> ass to risk
Try harder with hyphen. Or don't bother rather, it's probably the weakest part of the puzzle. "High fender".
Hey, it's not easy being a grammar policeman. It's like a lot of hard-won skills. Just when you really get the hang of dropping the pin in those little holes in a rotary indexing table, along comes CNC. d8-)
-- Ed Huntress
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(both petroleum products) and nothing mentioned for water, so I think that we can strike the water well checking for these.
Enjoy, DoN.
I guess I haven't been close to many big oil tanks. I guessed they weren't more than 30 feet deep.
This says the State of Kansas uses steel tapes to measure down to the water table in 1,380 wells each year:
[ ... ]
Even so -- a longer tape than needed is better than one not long enough. :-)
Note that 50' was the *shortest* of those listed in the URL above.
O.K. I would have worried about the tape trapping water between layers and rusting -- not a problem with petroleum fluids. :-)
Enjoy, DoN.
50 feet isn't going to cut it for water wells. 150 to 300 feet is moderate, some go as deep as 1000 feet.
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