Americans have a great fondness for short-hand expressions.
It may reflect impatience, or mental laziness, or it may reflect a certain kind of sentimentality. Perhaps all of them.
For example, the Eisenhower Expressway in Chicago is typically called "the Ike," and there are scores of such examples.
In some states, the official road signs on highways actually feature abbreviations, and they are abbreviations that may not even be meaningful to newcomers at high speeds.
