(Untitled)

[wwidsith]

Researching yet another tiresome argument with some grammar maven who objected to less being used to mean fewer, I was interested (though not surprised) to see that this common “mistake” has a pedigree going all the way back to Old English. According to the OED, it “originates from the OE. construction of lǽs adv. (quasi-n.) with a partitive

Comments

[weofodthignen]

Tangentially--you got a long æ onto LJ! How ever did you do that?

M

[wwidsith]

okaaay....with acute accents you can use &x01FC; for Ǽ, and &x01FD; for ǽ.

I prefer macrons, but not everyone has the right font support. As far as I know, there is no precomposed Unicode character for æ + macron, so you have to use the "combining macron" character. &x00E6;&x304; for example should give ǣ.