Of the 143 cases of abbreviation or shortened words

I am (re)reading Aunt's Aren't Gentlemen by P.G. Wodehouse. It was published in October 1974, shortly before Wodehouse's death on 14 February, 1975.

I noted a particular verbal tick Wodehouse ascribed to the protagonist, Bertram Wooster, of abbreviating words to a representative initial letter. I am familiar with it from the many other Wooster/Jeeves books but it had not ever registered with me just how frequent this tick occurred. Reflecting on the observation, I came to the conclusion that perhaps I had not especially noticed the affectation because I was relatively young when I first read Wodehouse's oeuvre. Probably 13-18 years old or so.

I imagined that I was a young enough reader that I was probably unconsciously skipping over the instances where this occurred as one does as a young reader, often skipping over unknown words. Perhaps.

But then I had reason to look up Aunts Aren't Gentlemen in Wikipedia to get the publication date. In doing so, I discover that indeed, the abbreviations are more prevalent in Aunts Aren't Gentlemen than in the earlier books.

Bertie regularly abbreviates his words, with abbreviation becoming more common as the series progresses. Of the 143 cases of abbreviation or shortened words (such as "the old metrop"), only 11 occur in the short stories, and more than half occur in the novels that follow Ring for Jeeves (with that novel having none, as Bertie is not present in the book). In order to make the abbreviations comprehensible, Bertie either introduces a word first and then abbreviates it, or abbreviates a familiar, clichéd phrase. Wodehouse uses these abbreviations to repeat information in varied and humorous ways. For example, Bertie uses three abbreviations in a passage in chapter 3:

So far, I said to myself, as I put back the receiver, so g. I would have preferred, of course, to be going to the aged relative's home, where Anatole her superb chef dished up his mouth-waterers, but we Woosters can rough it, and life in a country cottage with the aged r just around the corner would be a very different thing from a country c without her coming through with conversation calculated to instruct, elevate, and amuse.

Amazing. I had an impression and then, courtesy of the internet, I discover someone has actually done the counting.

Now I can know. I wasn't skipping over the frequency of abbreviations. They were rare at the beginning of the series and built in frequency over the course. I was not skipping, I was inured.