Generate the answer for a given question. The question requires common knowledge of English. Make sure that the answer is in detail, long, consistent with the context, and requires general knowledge of English. To be less repetitive, please vary your language for each question. Give a proper explanation to answer, and if necessary, provide the definition of various terms. And conclude your answer if it's long. If you have used other resources (e.g., Merriam Webster's.) to answer the question, include citations in your answer. You don't need to paraphrase the context of your resources, but make sure that your answer is consistent and complete.

Q: How did 7 come to be an abbreviation for 'and' in Old English? is a beautiful question about the Tiroian 'et', which is now the '' character 1. My question is what impact did the association of this 7-like-glyph have on the eventual placement of keyboards placing the & on Shift+7 combination? The Wikipedia article on the QUERTY keyboard shows that the ampersand was a separate key in the bottom left of the keyboard in the original patent application drawings. The patent was filed in 1878. The Das Keyboard blog shows a Full Duplex keyboard (with separate keys for upper and lower case letters) from 1897 with no ampersand key at all. I have not yet been able to find a reference to the first keyboard to place the ampersand and 7 together. The Wiki article on the ampersand only mentions that it is usually keyed via Shift+7, but occasionally on 6 or 8 instead. Dvorak layouts appear to share similar associations between 7 and &. So is it a coincidence? Or is there some association? 1 This looks really different in the EL&U site fontface. See the linked question or the Wikipedia article for more faithful renderings.

A: Although the 7 was the ampersand on IBM's standard keyboard layout, that is hardly universal. The first nine printable characters in ASCII are ! ' # $ % & ' ( ), which should give a good clue as to what the top row of a teletype keyboard looked like. On many early teletypes and terminals (and also, BTW, on the Apple ][), the shift key toggled bit 4 of the character being produced, thus it would turn a 1 (011 0001) into ! (010 0001), and , (010 1100) into < (011 1100). Since the digits 1-9 received consecutive code, so did the characters produced by combining them with the shift key. Shift-7 on those keyboards was apostrophe; the ampersand was shift-6. Other typewriter keyboards also varied considerably in where they put the ampersand. Its association with the number 7 is nowhere near as consistent as the association between 1 and !, 3 and #, 4 and $, or 5 and % which existed in both older computer keyboards and today's US arrangement.
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Q: I just realized there are some people around my workplace who always try to correct me when using a certain word, saying that that's not how I should speak, and I should use other words (the ones they provide me with) or pretend they didn't understand what I was saying, but it's pretty clear that they did understand. This again with the same purpose, of making me rephrase, or use the words they expect. When doing this, they use, among others, the argument that they sure have understood, but others might not. But then, nobody else complains of not having understood what I was saying. Another argument they use is that even if they understood it, what I said was incorrect. I make the assumption that when I express my ideas in words, I use enough details to get the point across. I would call this type of non-constructive attitude a 'hater' attitude, but I'm curious whether there's a more specific word for this. meta: I'm not a native English speaker, and I don't know a word for this in my language, I'd just use the dictionary to find out if my language has an analogous word. Anyway it would be good to know if there's a word for this concept in these two languages. meta: Also, the situations I refer to happen (mostly) when I'm speaking my own language, but the language really isn't the point here, because I do speak multiple languages and I did meet this behavior (though very rarely) when speaking any language.

A: You could call a person who does that a pedant: Pedant (noun) a person who annoys other people by correcting small errors and giving too much attention to minor details; one who unduly emphasizes minutiae in the presentation or use of knowledge (Merriam-Webster)
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Q: I wrote this sentence: Why wouldn't it be valid? --and I realized that without the contraction it becomes: Why would it not be valid? As opposed to 'why would not it be valid,' as the contraction would imply. What's going on here? Why can I contract across the middle word this way? Or, to put it the other way, why can't I 'de-contract' this without moving the not over by a word?.

A:
Even though the standard term for these combinations of an auxiliary + -n't is 'contractions', grammatically they act like single, indivisible words*; rather than like two words slurred together (though that was evidently their historical origin). This single word is a auxiliary, so it goes in the normal position for an auxiliary in an interrogative sentence: after the question-word and before the subject. Why wouldn't it be valid? Question word - auxiliary - subject - [rest of sentence] When you use 'would not,' on the other hand, you have two words: the auxiliary 'would', and the distinct word 'not' (a word that doesn't fit very well into the general part-of-speech categories). The auxiliary again goes into the normal position for an auxiliary. The word 'not' has its own, different rules for where it goes in a sentence. Why would it not be valid? Question word - auxiliary - subject - [rest of sentence] *In fact, some linguists think the negative suffix in these words is best analyzed as an inflection in modern English, like the suffix '-s' used in third person.
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