The first three letters of a license plate I saw the other day were EYB, which led me to think immediately of eyeball and has made me temporarily/mildly interested in shorthand. The incident was doubly amusing because the trio of letters corresponded to the organ I was using to read them.

I’d like to develop my own shorthand at some point. It wouldn’t consist of an archive of usable letter combinations or be intended to come off as a code readable by few. Instead, I’d come up with a few rules such that the shorthand equivalent of any word could be determined just by their application. For instance, for 2 syllable compound words, rule 4: the shorthand consists only of the letters necessary to form the sound of the first syllable plus the first letter of the second syllable. So bedtime = bedt. Rule 5: the letters used to form the sound of the first syllable must be sourced from the letters used in the first syllable of the original word. This is why EYB isn’t IB. Rule 6: the shorthand equivalent doesn’t distinguish between singular and plural, so that EYB could represent eyeball or eyeballs.