So it surprised me when Electrum generated some seed words that had more than one possibilities when writing down word (the words were GROUp - GROUnd and COMMit - COMMon.
Electrum seedphrase wasn't designed to be shortened unlike BIP 39 but to be used in full.
To me a full word is easier than a short word
The 4 letter shortened words will be safe to use because there's no difference.
No it's not safe to use. OP has already given an example
The words used by BIP 39 are quite different from that of electrum.
There's no uniqueness of first four letters in electrum seedphrase words.
If you generate a new wallet from wallet that use BIP39 and you want to retrieve in Electrum, you will have no problem too.
You would have some problems except you configure it manually.
Electrum does not natively support BIP39 seed phrases.
Their word list and checksum rules differs and if you try to enter a BIP39 seed into Electrum
it may consider it invalid and reject it
Even if it works the keys generated would be different because electrum uses
Different key derivation model.