Your comment reminded me of the classic Ken Thompson quote:

>Ken Thompson was once asked what he would do differently if he were redesigning the UNIX system. His reply: "I'd spell creat with an e."

There was definitely a mentality at this time that symbols should be short. Probably partly because of the low resolution terminals of the time, and especially teletypes but also maybe because of different practices and a different ecosystem. That's how we ended up with /usr instead of /user and /mnt instead of /mount.