While it's true that there are many abbreviations of "message," surely some are inherently easier to cognitively process than others. Compare: "eag", "sg", "ms

While it's true that there are many abbreviations of "message," surely some are inherently easier to cognitively process than others. Compare: "eag", "sg", "msa" -- randomly chosen letters (in orig order) vs. "age", "meg","mag" -- purposefully misleading substrings, vs "msg", "mes", "mssg" -- closer to semantic content My point is not so much to quibble, but to suggest that we may have something to learn from cognitive psychology on the subject. Does anyone recall the recent study that showed taht as lnog as the fsrit and lsat lteters of wrods wree the smae, poplee culod gnerlaly mkae out the manenig? (whew! hard to type that.) This suggests to me that at the very least, retaining the first letter is important, and possibly the last as well. My qualm about single letter variable names is that they may require more "lookup time" (on average) because so much of the semantic content has been stripped from the name. I'm curious if anyone has actually researched this? I'm only theorizing here.