And....?

What does this symbol - & - mean?  And what do you call it?  First question is easiest - it means "and".  Mostly now seen in commercial names - Marks & Spencer, Barnes & Noble, and so on.  And it's called the ampersand.  Funny name for a funny symbol. Where does it come from?  Well it started out life as the Latin word for and - "et", and over time (this was of course before printing) scribes would join the "e" and "t" together and make the combination more and more flowery until it approached something like the shape we are used to today.  More fascinating is where the name came from.  At one time it was treated as a letter - the last letter in the alphabet, so if you were reciting the alphabet, you would finish - "X, Y, Z, And". Except of course the obvious retort would be "and what?".  So students started to say "X, Y, Z, and - per se - And".  Per se is Latin and means "by itself" or "on its own".  And it's easy to see how "and per se and" morphed over time into "ampersand".