My Grammar and I (Or Should That Be 'Me'?): Old-School Ways to Sharpen Your English

From the long to the short of it

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An abbreviation (from Latin brevis  ,  meaning  short  )  is  a  shortened  form  of  a
word  or  phrase  that  for  whatever  reason  we  do  not  choose  to  write  out  in  full.
Strictly  speaking,  an  abbreviation  is  a  word  or  words  with  the  end(s)  left  off
(Prof, vol, CD, MP ), whereas one where something is left out of the middle (Mr,
Dr  )  is  a  contraction  ,  but  most  people  use  abbreviation  indiscriminately  to
cover  both.  If  an  abbreviation  of  several  words  forms  something  that  is
pronounced  as  a  word  in  itself  (UNESCO,  radar,  scuba,  AIDS  ),  this  is  an
acronym .
In British English it used to be the rule that an abbreviation was followed by a
full  stop,  but  a  contraction  was  not.  Like  so  many  other  rules,  however,  this  is
fighting a losing battle against common usage, which tends to drop the full stops
unless  they  are  necessary  to  avoid  ambiguity.  No.  for  number  (from  the  Latin
numero , and therefore strictly speaking a contraction) is frequently found with a
full stop, to avoid confusion with no meaning the opposite of yes . The full stop
is  also  still  the  norm  for  a.m  and  p.m  .  American  English  tends  to  use  more
punctuation  than  British  English  and  regularly  retains  the  full  stop  after
contractions such as Mr , Mrs and Dr .
A  number  of  common  words  such  as  cello  ,  flu  and  phone  are  actually
abbreviations  or  clipped  forms  (of  violoncello  ,  influenza  and  telephone  )  and
would once have been written with an apostrophe (or two): ’cello , ’flu’ , ’phone
.  Some  people  still  do  this,  but  most  would  say  it  was  old-fashioned.  Some
shortenings  have  become  so  accepted  that  to  use  the  long  form  of  the  word
would sound pompous:
Jane will not be at work today because she thinks she might have influenza .
Tim works out at the gymnasium every day and then catches the omnibu s home.
Pam is pushing the perambulator to the park .
On  the  other  hand,  tache  instead  of  moustache,  doc  instead  of  doctor,  or  gator
instead of alligator may be too casual for formal writing.
The  theatre  critic  Kenneth  Tynan,  as  an  Oxford  undergraduate  in  the  1940s,
wrote mag. and exam. to indicate that he meant magazine and examination . But
it  is  not  stretching  the  imagination  very  far  to  think  that  he  was  being

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pretentious.