The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The practice began with the telegraph when charges were by character and brevity was desirable. It was holy grail by the Navy. Be brief in correspondence....... not with abbreviations necessarily but with succinct writing. That too was the result of Morse encoded communications.
More recently, much business and all international business was conducted by telex. Telex was expensive but the only recourse. I still use the salutation rgds short for Regards or Best Regards in e mail.
The piece noted is the current generation picking up the old ways and even expanding them in text messags. The writer is illustrating a knowledge and mastery of current communications. Texting was hard and reduction of characters speeded the message. The new phones allow much easier typing but the old abbreviated way survives.
Then there were the hams. They communicated by Morse and developed a whole language of short cuts. The Q codes allowed a series of 3 characters to convey a message.
There was also short hand that secretaries used in the old days, and more recently brief hand became poplular. For those of you not familiar with it, briefhand uses the alphabet, but eliminates most of the vowels and has a set of one letter abbreviations for commonly used words: “The” becomes e, and of becomes f, etc. They actually taught briefhand cources when I was in college in the 1970’s and a lot of students took the course so they could take class notes faster.
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