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Two days later the Nabob received a note from Hemerlingue, almost undecipherable with its little fly-tracks, complicated by abbreviations more or less commercial, behind which the ex-sutler concealed his absolute lack of orthography: "MON CH/ANC/CAM/ Je ne puis décid/t'accom/ chez Le Merq/. Trop d'aff/en ce mom/. D'aill/v/ ser/mieux seuls pour caus/. Vas-y carrém/. On t'att/. R/Cassette, tous les mat/de 8
Nowadays, however, Gabrielle acted as his eyes; and so devoted was she to her father that she took a keen interest in his dry-as-dust hobbies, so that after his long tuition she could decipher and read a twelfth-century Latin manuscript, on its scrap of yellow, crinkled parchment, and with all its puzzling abbreviations, almost as well as any professor of palaeography at the universities, while inscriptions upon Gothic seals were to her as plain as a paragraph in a newspaper.
So few has long been denizened; no wonder, since it is nothing more than si peu Anglicized. Letter to the Lord High Treasurer. Ibid. He complains of "manglings and abbreviations." "What does your Lordship think of the words drudg'd, disturb'd, rebuk'd, fledg'd, and a thousand others?"
A certain professor of English in one of our large universities has for years been in the habit of dictating the following directions, with illustrations, to his students beginning composition: "Fold the paper lengthwise from right to left, leaving the single edge to your right hand. Endorse on the first three lines. Do not use abbreviations in writing the date.
Cards sent to friends before leaving for a long journey, are issued with the addition of P. P. C. in the left hand corner. These cards are inclosed in heavy and elegant, though plain, envelopes, ornamented with a tasteful monogram or initial. In wedding invitations, all abbreviations, like eve. for evening, will be avoided, as well as P. M.; the word afternoon being preferable.
The reading of a few lines of text, the punctuation, the elaborate glosses full of wellnigh incomprehensible abbreviations; all dictated slowly enough for a class of a hundred or more to take down every word. Lessons in those days were indeed readings. For a clever boy who was capable of going forward quickly, they must have been great waste of time.
For that hand writes often by abbreviations, hieroglyphics, and short characters, which, like the laconism on Belshazzar's wall, are not to be made out but by a key from that Spirit that indited them. And yet again, 'To thoughtful observers the whole world is one phylactery, and everything we see an item of the wisdom, and power, and goodness of God. How any man, not to speak of one of the wisest and best of men, such as Samuel Johnson was, could read all that, and still stagger at Sir Thomas Browne holding himself to be a living miracle of the power, and the love, and the grace of God, passes my understanding.
He preferred it all when he was addressed in ordinary conversation, he explained to them, but he had no objections to the title, "Mistah Breckenridge," when they felt hurried. This interested every inmate of the Adelaide, and for a few days amazingly amused several, who gave play to their fancy in the use of abbreviations which struck them as humorous.
Not least "among those present" was the ubiquitous reporter for the Courier, biting his pencil and using abbreviations in his notes with such freedom that the list of gifts, when finally published, contained such startling entries as: Eliza and her Germ Garden, and The Victorious Anthropology.
The Teutonic Gelehrte, gallantly devoting a half-century to his pipe and his locative case, fencing the result of his labors with a bristling hedge of abbreviations, cross-references, and untranslated citations that take panglottism for granted as an ordinary incident of human culture, too hastily assumes a tenacity of life on the part of his reader as great as his own.
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