abbreviate
verb, transitive. To make briefer, to shorten, to reduce to a shorter form intended to stand for the whole.
As Mr. Kempke launched into his usual drone five minutes into class, Charley surveyed his fellow students, one by one. He needed to borrow someone’s notes taken during the previous day’s class, in order to prepare for the quiz Kempke planned to give them on Firday.
His gaze stopped on Hillary Meyer--the only student already diligently scribbling away as Kempke talked. Charley was reluctant to engage the girl in conversation. His friends would wonder what possessed him to spend time talking to such a dog, but he needed the information that he knew she possessed. He had cut classes yesterday and forged his dad’s signature on the written excuse he had handed in to the office this morning. He needed class notes that were richly detailed, and he could tell that Hillary’s would fill that requirement.
She was still busy annotating in her notebook when class ended. Charley stepped across two aisles and paused beside her. She capped her pen and peered at his face through her glasses. Their lenses were so thick that they magnified her eyes, which were, he noticed for the first time, a rich hazel.
“Hillary, I was wondering if I could borrow your notes from yesterday. I was out sick.”
She studied him as she shoved her pen, notebook and textbook into her massive tote without looking. “You don’t have anything contagious, do you?”
Charley was startled. What had caused his absence? For a moment, he couldn’t remember the reason he had included in the note he had written. He found himself gazing at Hillary’s smooth, faintly-rose-tinted cheeks, unmarred by a single pimple, thinking it a shame that such lovely skin was hidden behind those massive spectacles.
“Upset stomach,” he blurted, remembering. “Something I ate the night before.”
Hillary considered him, then heaved her tote from the floor to her desktop. “Can you photocopy them and return them today? I have to study, too, you know.”
Charley doubted that, but assured her that he could do as she asked, although he regretted the necessity of spending money to photocopy the notes. Without saying anything more, Hillary retrieved the notebook from the interior of her tote and offered it to him. Charley opened it and leafed through to the last used page, then turned back a page or two.
“Just let me find where you started yesterday’s notes,” he mused. Hillary stood and leafed back two pages further than he had.
“There.” She pointed at the top of the page, where she had jotted the date.
Charley read for a moment, then frowned. “What’s this ‘IR?’ What does that mean?”
“’Industrial Revolution.’ I abbreviated it after the first few minutes of note-taking. Didn’t you?”
Charley met her gaze with consternation, unwilling to admit that his own notes were so sketchy that he had never had to solve the problem of how to condense the material so as to make note-taking less laborious. When he didn’t reply, she pulled her tote’s strap over her shoulder and moved toward the classroom door. “At first, I abbreviated it as ‘Indus Rev,’ then ‘Ind Rev.’ Finally, I just shortened it to ‘IR.’ Saves a lot of ink.”
Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.
