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May 30, 2008

Excellent Ellipsis Essay

Ellipsis, I love 'em and use them far too often. It's a bad habit, but I cling to the practice because sometimes it's simply a lazy way to insinuate something without having to explain...well, you know.

Wiki defines ellipsis:

Ellipsis (plural ellipses; from Greek ἔλλειψις 'omission') in printing and writing refers to the row of three full stops (... or . . . ) or asterisks (* * *) indicating an intentional omission. This punctuation mark is also called a suspension point, points of ellipsis, periods of ellipsis, or colloquially, dot-dot-dot. An ellipsis is sometimes used to indicate a pause in speech, an unfinished thought or, at the end of a sentence, a trailing off into silence (aposiopesis).

The site goes on to say:

The use of ellipses can either mislead or clarify, and the reader must rely on the good intentions of the writer who uses it.

That's a pretty fair warning to anyone reading this blog. Ambiguity is probably one of my better traits, in fact. I am what I am....

I sometimes often misuse ellipses and sometimes almost always fail to end a sentence that's ending in ellipses with the correct extra and fourth period, the extra ellepses. I hope that's simply an oversight, a typo, and not some character fault.... It probably validates the fact that I'm lazy....

I'm making an effort to be correct. That might not be good enough for you, but...there ARE ellipses haters out there....

If they find their way to this blog....

I've used ellipses a lot, and have even been accused by a former girlfriend that I also speak that way. Imagine that.... I will have to admit I do sometimes speak haltingly... and sometimes st...st...st...stutter a bit. She and I had a rocky relationship, to put it mildly, and it finally ended badly after ending semi-badly a half-dozen previous times. I'm sure you know how that goes.... I also easily lose my train of thought which isn't hard when one has a one-track mind....

I always preferred to quietly breakup with her via a note left on her pillow or in a sock drawer. As per the definition of ellipses, I would write my sad and tortured thoughts in a melodramatic way: "I gave and gave to this relationship, but you never even tried...."

I quit writing those the next-to-last time we broke up when she said "Is this another one of those damn dot-dot-dot letters?"

Did you know that "dot-dot-dot" is the Morse symbol for the letter "S" as in "SOS"? I wasn't for sure...some folks don't know things like that. "- - -" or "Dash-Dash-Dash" is "O". Just thought I'd mention that... Sometimes I use dashes -- when I think they're better instead of ellipses--but usually only one - or at the most, two --.

FOUR dots .... or "dot-dot-dot-dot" is the Morse code for the letter "H".

Just thought you should know....

Now you can spell "HOSS" in Morse Code.

My next essay:

"What's so wrong with using three question marks??? "

3 comments:

Mike said...

I bumped this up because someone found it via a Google search.

I'm sure they were looking for something more educational. I'm sure they were disappointed. I'm sure they thought they wasted their time.

I'm sure they won't be back.

garazon said...

LOL Well I'm sure they weren't but so disappointed, it's a great post and actually informative, I have to admit I never knew the term for them before... didn't even know there was a term actually! Well I'm guilty of overusing them too, I always have I think... just think it's probably out of laziness as its easier to hit three (or more) .'s than it is to end the sentence and use the CAP key to start a new one! LOL
I was thinking I had replied to this post originally but I see not. I'm bad for that too, I do read just about every post you make as I have your feed on my google page too, and I see many of them I want to reply to, I just rarely seem to get back to them like I should.

That feedjit is pretty cool isnt it. What I like most about it is the way you can actually see exact search terms people used to find their way to the site. And also for the same reason you bumped this one up when its showing the page they came to from a search query, pretty neat. Well I'm sure a lot of visitors to my site are disappointed as well when they realise the post they end up on has little to do with their search. :o) well its still neat to be getting some visits other than spammers for a change!

Oh let me tell you the funny bit I had in chat today with Alison. Well you know how it is with the time difference between us and she is near to going to bed when I get home from work but we usually try to manage a short chat every day... well all that's beside the point I was going to make. We were just generally speaking of what we had done and Alison said she had commented on a couple of our sites and yours and was talking about reading this particular post too as I found out after a few minutes of what was about to become a conversation from and Abbot and Costello bit. I asked which post she was talking about and she wrote " I have just enjoyed reading his post about the ........... that I use a lot , oh I forgot what he called them already but I found it quite amusing" well I was thinking the periods meant she couldn't remember the name of the post instead of using the ....s as an example... ;) oh... its not so funny really , one of them things you had to be there.. nevermind LOL
Oh who was it used to say that all the time? I think it was on Saturday night live back in the early days, someone would get rung up on something they misheard and go off on this long rant about it and when they were finally made to realise it was something completely different, they would just simply say "Never mind" in this really nasal sounding voice. Somehow Gilda Radner is coming to mind, but I'm not sure.. guess I could search but I am a lazy somebody and like you told Barb in one comment , will just wait till someone else does! lol
Ok thats enough jumping from one thing to the other in a single comment... off to go make some more use of... whats the plural of Ellipsis?... or IS it the plural... hmmm... well I'm gonna go make some more dots somewhere ;) lol
thanks Mike, appreciate your humour and your posts, I really do! and we get an education at the same time.. what a teacher!
G

Mike said...

I think you're correct about Gilda Radner. I was thinking of her the other day when there were several Gene Wilder films on the classic movie channel over the course of several days.

I appreciate you and Alison and everyone else who visits and especially those that post. Just got off the phone w/ my sister and was pleased to find out she visits frequently. I've rec. some emails from other people commenting on what they liked, some from distant cousins I barely know.

Never wanted a counter, don't want to do IP numbers, but it's interesting to see where folks wander in from.

I don't want to get too controversial and invite troublemakers in, so I don't much care that I don't get thousands of hits every day.

This post was about 11 months old, one of the first in this pathetic excuse for a blog. I thought it's pretty goofy, even when I wrote it. The story behind it is not only about the ex-g/f, but KT from Comms. made a comment about it somewhere else, saying that he'd never use "LOL" or ellipsis.