People didn’t used to write 1 + 1, they would write the sentence I et I, which is Latin for one and one. To make the plus sign, all they did was drop the e in et and leave the crossed +. By coincidence, ET also gave us &, and you can see how t became & simply by messing around with the typefaces on your word processor. Type an & and then switch the font to Trebuchet and you’ll get , to French Script MT and you’ll get , to Curlz MT and you’ll get , Palatino Linotype and you’ll get and finally, as this book is printed in Minion, you get .
