Abbreviation – Codified, One’s own, etc.

Last night I picked up GREGG DICTATION: DIAMOND JUBILEE SERIES just for something to read while eating a snack. For one thing, can you believe, based on a couple of business letters, that a hotel room in San Francisco cost $8 in 1963, and that a starting sales rep in NYC was paid $6000 per year?!
Anyway, there is lots of phrasing even in DJS and brief forms aplenty, but something struck me as odd:
There would be a word such as “appreciation” right there in the middle of other words and phrases, and it was spelled out in full.  It seems to me that such words as that just beg for abbreviation, e.g. A-P-R-E-ISH which would read back as either “appreesh” or “appree-tion” and be very clear to most any reader. It seems odd to go to the trouble to abbreviate some things and not others.  Even many words in Anniversary seem unnecessarily lengthy, some using the analogical endings and beginnings when a much shorter abbreviation would be very clear to a transcriber.
On the other hand, the Abbreviating Principle of writing through the first stressed syllable when suitable includes just such things and even contradicts some of the other things such as the word endings and beginnings.

(by ukulele144
for everyone)


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2 comments Add yours
  1. Thanks, Chuck, I should have checked my Anniversary sources more closely, altho' actually, I suppose I did in citing the abbreviating principle.  I guess it just seems to me that that principle is sufficient to take care of so many cases that one hardly needs anything else.

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