Being an OAP, I wake early. I’m often at my PC by 7am BST. Ie, (or, if you prefer, that is to say) I’m an old-age pensioner at his personal computer by 7 in the morning — ante meridiem is Latin for before mid-day — British Summer Time. “Short is best,” I wrote here four weeks ago, and the English language agrees. It loves abbreviations.

Its first ones were, in fact, Latin. Any medieval manuscript (or MS) is thick with words shortened to save both parchment and time. From that it was a short step to AD (anno Domini, in the year of the Lord), RIP (requiescat in pace, may he rest in peace), and MS itself (manu scriptum, written by hand). Later came eg (exempli gratia, for the sake of an example), ie (id est, that is), etc (et cetera, and the rest) — many of them. QED (quod erat demonstrandum, which was to be demonstrated), which, DV (Deo volente, God willing), I have done. By now, these Latinisms are de facto English.

We owe most of our strictly English abbreviations to science and other trades. The chemist has an entire laboratory of them. We say water, he says H2O. Old engineers used BSW (British Standard Whitworth) bolts, modern doctors use NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) machines.

Some abbreviations become acronyms. During World War II (WWII, if you prefer), Britain’s Royal Air Force, the RAF, was often pronounced Raf, and members of its Women’s Royal Naval Service were Wrens. NATO today is always a two-syllable word and often written as Nato. In other fields, the old General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was habitually spoken of as Gatt, and the disease AIDS is now Aids. But an abbreviation may, rarely, grow wings: Britain’s one-time Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry was officially shortened to OBLI, but widely known to other regiments as the obblygobblies.

Bit by bit

Officialdom loves abbreviations. To his flunkeys, Prince Charles is HRH, His Royal Highness, and a junior British diplomat will refer to his ambassador as HE, His Excellency. We British are peculiarly addicted: with a lifetime of public and wartime service behind him, meet Sir John Bloggs, KCMG, CVO, OBE, DSO, MC, MP (no, you guess, I won’t translate). But we’re not alone. Academe everywhere swarms with BAs and PhDs; many professions, notably medicine, will give you letters by the handful to stick after your name.

Another field that loves brevity is classified advertising. My local paper offers used cars in vgc and equipped with abs, ac, cl, em, esr, ew, pas and much else that I can’t interpret. Its dating ads are placed by people who WLTM (would like to meet) a soul- or at least a bed- mate with GSOH (a good sense of humour) for TLC (tender, loving care) in LTR (a long-term relationship).

As those examples show, we’ve become careless of the distinction between capital letters and lower-case (lc to us oldies of the press). That has its problems: a PRO may not be a pro, and in measurements M stands strictly for mega- and m for milli-. We also tend to omit the full-stops that formerly divided or ended abbreviations. This too can, in theory, cause trouble; both am and em exist already. But it too symbolizes the way abbreviations are becoming words in their own right.

It’s not only honorifics or names that are going this way. In the Seventies, AC/DC, the electrician’s shorthand for alternating and direct current, turned up as slang for bisexual. Of the abbreviations that fill computer ads, most are spoken in full: gigabytes, not gee-bee. But I’d think PC as much part of our language as personal computer (or, indeed, as politically correct). Asap goes one further: it’s usually pronounced ay-ess-ay-pee, or indeed as soon as possible, but I’ve heard assap.

Which is when my editor at The Telegraph (pbuh) wants my copy. I’ll have to finish pdq.