LONG SHORT DASH

I have no clue whether this has anything to do with the French president, but that's an interesting thing to think about here. A macron is a linguistic term for a horizontal diacritical line placed over a letter, usually used to mark heavy syllables. The word macron is from the Greek term makron, a conjugation of earlier makros, which meant "long" (kind of an etymological oxymoron, since a macron today is a rather short dash) and is the etymon of the prefix macro-, meaning "on a large scale". Makros definitely came from Proto-Indo-European, but the reconstruction varies with sources; it could be something like mak, mhkros, or mehk, all of which have a prominent m and k and mean something like "long" as well. Usage of the word has flatlined since 1880, but usage of macro- has dropped since 1990.