mal and malo

Question

I'm familiar with adjectives that are clipped before singular masculine nouns, e.g., grande, primero, bueno, ciento, and alguno. However, malo can be clipped in another position, as in "A causa de los problemas con el estómago, Roberto está muy mal." Do any other words allow truncation like this example?

Answer 1

Mal is used in your example sentence because it's functioning as an adverb for the verb estar. Roberto está mal. More examples are ''hablar mal de alguien'' and ''te oigo muy mal.''

The other thing you mentioned about shortening words is called ''apocope.'' Here is a link I found about it. Apocope

You will see you can shorten malo to mal, if it comes before a singular masculine noun.

Answer 2

This depends. Yes. There are slang versions of words that usually leave off the last letter which indicates the gender (feminine or masculine).