Failed punctuation

[David Casseres]

Bruce sez

>     My wife is a nurse, with her own set of shorthand and jargon.  Fer 
>     instance, a lower case "c" with a horizontal line over it means 
>     "with". 

That's one of those medieval scribes' abbreviations, indication the Latin 
"cum" with the "um" elided, the bar above the abbreviation showing that 
something has been elided.  Although these things vanished from printed 
text and then from most handwritten text, a few of them have hung on in 
medicine because medicine clings to its scraps of Latin.

Oddly enough, after the c-with-a-bar-over-it disappeared, English-writers 
developed an exact parallel for it, namely "w/" as an abbreviation for 
"with."


Cheers,
David