Commonly used short forms and their meanings

Ever since the days of our arboreal ancestors, mankind has been trying to reduce effort by innovating new necessities. And the result is in front of our eyes today. We want pizza, it gets delivered to our place. We want grocery, it gets delivered to our place at our convenient time.

This urge of humankind to reduce effort has actually helped us in many ways. Like, if our ancestors would not have made use of crude stone tools, we wouldn’t have been able to make the sophisticated equipment we used these days. Thus, everything undergoes change. However, in today’s world, we tend to forget willingly the etymology of the transformed form.

Taking the point of reducing effort to another level, let me take you through the commonly-used abbreviations. We all use them, though in our childhood, our teachers used to scold us for using them, nonetheless we used them for our convenience. Using an abbreviation in this fast-paced life is okay but not knowing the origin of the same may prove to be dangerous.

Probably the most commonly used short form is etc. Well yes, students do place it after writing a few examples and term it as End of Thinking Capability but jokes apart, etc means et cetra. In Latin, et cetera means “and others” or “and so on”. We generally use it to denote that there are more of the like in the list.

The second most-used short forms according to me are e.g. and i.e. Many of us often tend to overlook the thin line dividing the two and we end up in wrong or faulty application of the two short forms. While e.g. stands for exempli gratia, i.e. stands for id est.

Exempli gratia means “for the sake of an example” and id est means “that is to say”. Exempli gratia is used to cite examples and id est is used as an extension to support and make sense of what we state.

In today’s world, we often say that everything needs to have a record and thus resort to emails as the best option to keep record of our transactions, conversations etc. (et cetera!) and we often use N.B. below our text to make the reader note something or point out something important. But do we know what N.B. stands for? N.B. in Latin means nota bene which means “note well”.

Well wait a minute, was I talking of emails? Oh my my!! There goes another short form. Electronic mail. Sorry if I am sounding over preachy.

Scribes of this age have a habit of writing sic after quoting someone. So what does this sic mean? Sic stands for sic erat scriptum or in English, “thus was it written”. While it is a good practice to use sic after quoting what important people have written, it is somehow not a very good thing to not know the history or meaning of the same.

Very similar to etc. we also use et al. which essentially means et alii or “and other people”. The only difference between etc. and et al. is that the latter is used for human beings.

While using the short form for namely we reduce our time and effort by writing viz. Viz stands for videlicet or “that is to say”.

This was just a small list of short forms we commonly use but there are many which we apply in our daily life. We know the usage, we know why we are using the same but somehow we do not know wherefrom the short form has originated. Like it is important to know our family tree, it is also imperative to know the history and background of each and every short form.

I hope the next time you read or apply any short form; my small attempt will come to your mind. Just give a smile and that in itself will be the gift of my life. Remember, ‘not knowing’ is acceptable but the moment we add ‘wilfully’ before it, the fallout becomes dangerous.

Till then, Happy Reading!!!!!