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There are, therefore, only two classes of words, nouns and verbs; all others, prepositions, conjunctions, and so forth, being abbreviations, a kind of mental shorthand to save the trouble of enumerating the separate items. Tooke, in short, is a thoroughgoing nominalist. The realities, according to him, are sticks, stones, and material objects, or the 'ideas' which 'represent' them.
When Swift was absent, how ever, the two ladies occupied his apartments; and Stella became more than ever essential to his happiness. When they were separated for any length of time Swift wrote to Stella in a sort of baby-talk, which they called "the little language." It was made up of curious abbreviations and childish words, growing more and more complicated as the years went on.
Underwood, though her girls had such masculine names, had made so strong a protest against their being called by boyish abbreviations, that only in one case had nature been too strong for her, and Robina had turned into Bobbie. Wilmet's second name being Ursula, she was apt to be known as 'W.'W. 'Make haste, Felix, you intolerable boy! don't be so slow! cried Alda.
Briefly, "there haint no sich animal," as the old farmer said when he saw his first dromedary in a circus; it was merely a mistake, due to the telegraphic abbreviations which foreign correspondents employ to save cable tolls. What the correspondent meant to say was that the colonel had secured a sing-sing waterbuck and a topi.
To maintain the text of the Pandects, the Institutes, and the Code, the use of ciphers and abbreviations was rigorously proscribed; and as Justinian recollected, that the perpetual edict had been buried under the weight of commentators, he denounced the punishment of forgery against the rash civilians who should presume to interpret or pervert the will of their sovereign.
The piece abroad is the same as that played in Paris for the past eight years, an absurd, hasty translation in Flemish, Dutch, German, and Italian, a local adaptation, just as it happens, with variations, elisions and abbreviations, but always with the same ending, a shower of blows with gun and sword on all property-owners, communities, and individuals, compelling the surrender of their purses and valuables of every description, and which they gave up, even to remaining without a sou or even a shirt.
The ancient town of Cirencester the Caerceri of the early Britons, the Corinium of the Romans, and the Saxon Cyrencerne has been a place of importance on the Cotswolds from time immemorial. The abbreviations Cisetre and Cysseter were in use as long ago as the fifteenth century, though some of the natives are now in the habit of calling it Ciren. The correct modern abbreviation is Ciceter.
All day long, therefore, I carefully avoided going near the theatre, so as to give time for my heroic abbreviations to do their salutary work, and for news of them to spread through the city. But at midday I looked in again upon the copyists, to assure myself that all had been duly performed as I had ordered.
Poring so intently over those ancient papers with their great Old English capitals, their stiff flourishes, their quaint abbreviations, we should scarcely have been startled to see a peruked head bend above them and a hand with noisy quill go tracing along the lines of those long-ago "Whereases" and "Be it knowns."
He took from his pocket a little book covered with horny parchment, which he opened and presented to my dear teacher and myself. It contained an old Greek text, full of abbreviations and ligatures which at first gave me the effect of an illegible scrawl.
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