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It wasn't the right making votive candles of the guy.

And this is why I believe acronyms are pernicious in a way medieval Latin abbreviations were not: they re-name things with sounds that distract us from their actual names, making of what has been acronymized an opaque and ugly thing.

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So for instance, in my line of work, we have to deal with a horror known as the "Research Excellence Framework". This is almost always written "REF", and pronounced to rhyme with "steph".

This is not how we handle acronyms: our convention is almost always to speak out loud, or say silently inside ourselves when reading, the letters of the acronym, or the word they form, not the longer phrase for which they stand.

Medieval people after all read out loud much more than we do, and when they read out loud from an abbreviated Latin manuscript, they certainly read all the abbreviated words in their full form.

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With the medieval Latin system, once one is used to it, the abbreviation, so to speak, disappears. As one reads, what one perceives is the full word, with the abbreviation signs functioning just as ordinary letters.

However, there is a fundamental difference between the medieval Latin abbreviation and the contemporary acronym.

The acronym is like the medieval Latin abbreviation in that it serves to save time and space: we avoid many an unwieldy mouthful / fingerful by acronymizing.

Abandoned it surely has been. But persistent abbreviating has resurfaced in another form: the rise of the acronym, now omnipresent in certain kinds of prose, and common enough in speech.

Learning to read and write proficiently meant learning this system, rather than just the alphabet. Indeed the system became so ingrained that it was transferred to printing. It took several centuries for it to be completely abandoned in printed books.

So, for instance, the Latin word for "Lord" has the stem "domin-". This stem was abbreviated to "dn̄-". In the singular, one then added "s" for the subject form, "m" for the object form, "i" for the possessive form, and so forth. "dn̄s, dn̄m, dn̄i"

3 - For an ever increasing group of words, it became standard to write only some initial letters, with a line over or athwart them, and then the ending. Writing out endings was crucial in Latin, where the ending indicates the grammatical function of nouns, verbs and adjectives.

2 - Certain lines and squiggles stood for certain sounds. For instance a line over a vowel stood for "m" or "n"; a curlicue like an apostrophe at the end of a word stood for the very common word-ending "us".

1 - A host of very common words had standard abbreviations. So, for instance, "est" ("is") was "ē" or "÷"; "non" ("not") was "n̄" .

The medieval abbreviating system is complex and, as stated above, it expanded over the centuries. It was however remarkably uniform, given the extent of time and space, and the number of scribes involved. The system had three main elements.

Indeed, if anything, it's surprising that it was so late into the history of Latin script that extensive abbreviating became common practice: the ancients abbreviated Latin inscriptions a lot, but not so manuscripts.

That medieval scribes abbreviated is hardly surprising. Writing by hand is slow and parchment is fairly expensive, so that there was a premium on saving time and space.

As anyone who has had even a brief encounter with them knows, almost all medieval Latin manuscripts use a lot of abbreviations. Ninth-century manuscripts already have plenty, and by the fourteenth century many manuscripts abbreviate almost every word. ...

All of this brings into high relief the great genius of Milton (one of Byron's chief models, of course), whose Eden, for all its complexity and mirroring of Milton's own time and mind, is nevertheless Edenic, and never less than marvellous.

Byron's attempt to combine these problems with early Romantic psychological realism is wearying and unconvincing. A Cain who broods moodily, ingeniously and verbosely over what and why death might be does not fit the sort of story Genesis can offer.