I'm still a little surprised that it isn't pronounced 'et' - at least in American English. If you look at our founders, most of them were Latin literate (many had Greek as well, but that's to the side), and I'd expect they pronounced '&' in a sentence as the Latin 'et'. We still do when we say et cetera or et al.

'American' English because Daniel Webster de-confused some 'English' English spelling and pronunciation, and could have done similar for &.

Just my $0.02...