The Plague of Abbreviation

If ‘that blessed word Mesopotamia’ were in practical use to-day, it would doubtless suffer the horror of becoming Meso, or Ma.; for witness the fate of Pennsylvania and that blessed word California, over the sonority of which commerce does not permit us to linger. Oh, for a little leisure in an age of short cuts! We are wedded to abbreviation — and have been previously divorced from courtesy. Maryland, my Maryland has been ‘ doctored ’ to Md.; we no longer have time for company, but only for co.; and street and saint have become one and indivisible. The present writer has therefore determined to take an occasional holiday from this orgy of shortening, and to permit himself, on envelopes and elsewhere, the luxury of polysyllables. North shall not become a negation, or east a mere initial. The post-office clerk shall not dim his sight in profane endeavors to distinguish Missouri from Maine, and New York from New Jersey. Esquire shall flaunt its full ensign, though Mr. must remain dwarfed for lack of a fair fullness. One cannot permit Mister: it should be used only in humorous stories.

Wilt join, reader, in this holiday? It is a just protest against merciless ‘efficiency,’ an assumption of occasional leisure in which one may possess one’s soul in peace. Most of us have completely forgotten that mob was once mobile vulgus, and that Jonathan Swift inveighed against its slang abbreviation. Surely the rage for shortening reached a reductio ad absurdum when circa was made circ., an abbreviation which, with its period, is exactly as long as the original! What would Puck have said of such pranks with language? Let us return, if not to Latin, at least to sanity. Especially exasperating to tyros are those ecclesiastical abbreviations, for we know not the complete words. What docs ‘ persp.’ mean — perspective or perspiration? And is ‘ prob.’ probably or probity? As for q.v., ’t is hopeless to those who render not unto Cæsar the things that are his.

In a recent nightmare occasioned by reflections such as the above, the present writer found himself quoting,

And before his agonized waking he had asked himself whether a man may fill his belly with the e. wind. Whereupon some saint banished him to Hades, or at least to Purgatory, for addressing him familiarly as ‘St.’ It was almost like calling him ‘old chap.’ One trembles to think what, in a moment of inadvertence or natural embarrassment, at the pearly gates, one might call Saint Peter!

Yet there is one justifiable form of abbreviation — the loving diminution of Christian names. Among those that ‘carry a perfume in the mention are Will Shakespeare and Kit Marlowe — for thus their intimates knew them. Was Ben Jonson ever Benjamin? And who would wish to know that fictitious personage ‘true Jack Falstaff, sweet Jack Falstaff’ by any other name? He was never Sir John to his friends, only to ‘the world.’ Lamb complained that, after the death of an especially intimate companion, he had no one left to call him Charley. And he was not joking when he said it. Who does not love Dick Steele — and have respect for Joseph Addison? Sam Johnson often signed his name thus, which may show why he was a ‘clubbable’ man. Oliver Goldsmith was not Oliver at his club. A famous couplet preserves his abbreviation — that in which Burke said that he wrote like an angel but talked like poor Poll. One cannot think of the renowned orator, however, as Ed! It seems a kind of profanation. And still more so in the case of good old Jeremy Taylor. The sense of fitness ‘is all.’ Ben Franklin by any other name would be as hard-headed, but much too dignified. Walter Whitman would be almost unrecognizable — even though he lengt hened Manhattan to Mannahatta. But how Lamb would have loved Kipling’s pun when he dubbed a friendly American publisher ‘Effendi.'

The present writer has sometimes wickedly wondered whether the Sirens addressed Ulysses as Uly; but it is a profane speculation. Dorothy Wordsworth, in her delightful journal, always refers to her gifted brother as William. He was evidently not like Will Shakespeare — though, as Lamb slyly remarked, he (William) could doubtless have written the works of Will ‘if he had had the mind.’ But would he have written to his love that sonnet in which Shakespeare says, —

Or that other which ends, —

Such a name belongs among the joys, not the sorrows, of abbreviation. But why have we wholly lost such beautiful words as loving-kindness and per adventure, which have been abbreviated out of existence save in that inspired prose of the seventeenth century? And day spring is something quite other than day. It carries a perfume in the mention! Dayspring and eventide — some of us are old-fashioned enough not to part with them. They are the terms of an age of imagination and of music, the age which gave us Shakespeare and the King James Version.