At some stage you may have abbreviated the name of a mineral when writing a thesis, report, or publication. This could have been for a common mineral such as quartz (Qz) or muscovite (Ms). But there are some more noto riously long mineral names for which a short ened version can be rather useful. Take, for example, the 34 letter long potassicmagnesio fluoroarfvedsonite (usefully abbreviated to “Pmfarf”, where “arf” represents “arfvesonite”)…