This one's for Desperance ...

[durham_rambler]

Over the weekend, visiting family, mt sister-in-law pulled out a file of old exam papers that her husband (my brother) and I had taken at school in the sixties. Among which was the Oxford and Cambridge Use of English paper I had sat in 1965. The first exercise was a précis, an extract from JBS Haldane's essay On Being the Right Size, which we were told was about 800 words long and we were asked to summarise it in '300 words or less'.

This one is for desperance because he has me trained with a Pavlovian reaction to the incorrect use of 'less'. The instruction should have read '300 words or fewer'.