[chrismorgan]

Interesting addendum on the matter of reversing “æsthetic”: I asked my parents what they reckoned, and they both went the other way, reckoning that if you wrote æ in the initial word it should stay æ; my dad said he wouldn’t write it that way in the first place, but that if you’ve written it that way you were treating æ as a letter more than just a way of drawing a certain pair of letters. In declaring otherwise, I was using the linguistic approach, which acknowledges æ as a ligature of the ae diphthong from Latin, being purely stylistic and not semantic. And so we see still more how these things are approximations and subjective.