just by coincidence, this cam in Michael Quinions newsletter recently

Weird Words: Apocope /@'pQk@pi:/
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Leaving out the last letter, syllable, or part of a word.


When you hear about the "huntin', shootin', fishin'" aristocracy of
eighteenth-century Britain, the speakers are committing apocope. In
the same way, when you talk about "mag" instead of magazine, "fab"
when you mean fabulous, or "cred" for credibility, these are all
apocopic cases.


Perhaps it's our rush-hurry-urgent age, but it seems that such
energetic abbreviations are becoming more common, not merely with
students who produce slangy in-terms such as "psych", "chem" and
"maths" ("math" in the US). "Apocope" comes from the Greek word
"apokoptein", to cut off, made up of "apo-", from or away, plus
"koptein", to cut.


Incidentally, if you instead cut the sound off the start of a word,
the right name is "aphesis" (an example being "squire", an aphetic
form of "esquire"); if you drop sounds in the middle (for which the
classic - and extreme - example is "fo'c's'le" for the crews'
quarters on board ship, in full "forecastle"), the process is
called "syncope".

(that was folllowed this week by this!!
"APOCOPE I walked into a minefield of definition while trying to
explain this word last week. If you check various dictionaries, you
find that some give much the definition I supplied ("leaving out
the last letter, syllable, or part of a word") while others have a
more restrictive meaning ("omission of the final sound or sounds of
a word"). This is a subtle but significant difference.


Linguists prefer to restrict this word to situations in which one
or more sounds (technically, phonemes) are lost from the end of a
word. Spelling differences or changes in pronunciation don't count.
As Professor Larry Horn pointed out, the definition I quoted would
allow "catalog" to be an apocopic form of "catalogue", which he is
sure it isn't - the loss of the final letters is to him irrelevant,
because they're not pronounced. Other linguist subscribers have
similarly argued that words such as "huntin'" (an example I used)
cannot be apocope, since the missing last letter signals a change
in the value of the final sound, not its loss.


The problem for mere interpreters of language such as myself is
that some reference works take a wider view that includes this sort
of abbreviation. I place in evidence, as one example, The Columbia
Guide to Standard American English of 1983: "Common examples in
American English are singin', dancin', and raisin' cain".
"