I just encountered this article on Lifehacker, which argues against using ellipses in text messages, and implies that the main culprits of using them are us old out of touch boomers who don’t know any better. Well…balderdash! Key quote:
Replying “ok…” can leave a text reader feeling as if you’re leaving something unsaid.
Well, yeah, maybe that’s what I’m trying to do! I’ve used that very phrase many times:
ok…
(meaning: expressing mild confusion or skepticism at something, in a slightly sardonic manner)
ok…?
(meaning: expressing slightly stronger confusion or skepticism at something, in a less subtly sardonic manner)
ok…!
(meaning: well, that just got said…)
I also use ellipses in a more traditional way, such as to denote a part I’ve snipped out of somebody’s post I’m quoting.
I have on occasion seen posters and commenters who use ellipses almost in place of periods. I don’t know that there is a pattern in who those are though. Other than on the more ignorant end of the spectrum.
I thought that it was periods that you weren’t supposed to use in texts. That’s what I’ve been hearing lately, that the young folks find sentences that end with periods to be “rude,” somehow.
I’m kind of in the middle on this. I haven’t fully adapted to text-speak, so I often write in full sentences and use punctuation. But I notice that when I’m recipient, that style seems… off. Not casual. Hypercorrect, thus maybe a touch of grammar narcissism.
I can’t criticize it myself, because I also do it, but I’m aware there is a shift.
However, I would never use ellipses in an synchronous medium like text. To write something like “ok…?” just seems like something from a Judge Parker comic strip.
If infants madly texting each other are going to declare themselves arbiters of the English language, I’ll give their advice exactly the consideration that it deserves.
I interpret a text ending in elipsis as “Don’t respond back to me; I’m busy typing more now and you should wait for that to arrive before trying to respond.”
We did have that one whackjob whose posts were always a wall-o-text run-on of phrase after phrase after phrase all connected by ellipsis. He claimed to be unable to stop himself; that’s “just how his brain worked”. Definitely a he. Probably “on the spectrum” as the kids have it these days.
I considered writing a post similar to the OP’s point, which is that the ellipsis has a meaning in english writing and people who text are dumb for not understanding it.
But after reading the subsequent posts, I’ve realized that textspeak isn’t english. It’s some bastardized textual dialect with its own rules and customs - one that I hope to never, ever use or learn.
They want to repurpose symbols to meant whatever silly thing they want, more power to them. Not my problem.
I agree with the OP’s use of ellipses - those are used to convey specific meaning that differs from a plain “ok.”
And while I don’t use a period at the end of a single-sentence text, it feels weird to leave it off the last sentence in a two-sentence text. But sending a text of more than one sentence is also a sign of being an oldster, so I’m probably screwed either way.
“Okaaaaay” spoken with a changing tone during the long drawn out “aaaaaaaa” part can convey agreement, disagreement, questioning, contempt, dismissal, or anger. Likewise pauses between almost any two words can contain an “um”, “er” or “ah” sound that between length and tone can convey a handful of emotions and adjectives.
These verbal techniques don’t convey their ideas explictly, perfectly, or unambiguously. But they get pretty close.
The OP’s uses of ellipses are the txt-equivalent of that same idea. Nothing very surprising here, despite some triggered pearl clutching.
I think what people are missing here is that the point of the article is about people using ellipses when they don’t have any extra meaning behind them. I deal with it all the time at work in emails. Someone will ask me a question, I’ll respond immediately, and then I get back a “Thanks…”
I’m left wondering if I did something wrong or if that’s just how they type.
Who here remembers Herb Caen, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, who used so many ellipses in his columns that he became known as a patriarch (perhaps THE patriarch) of “three-dot journalism”?
You’re right that this is the only way to read the article and have it make sense, but the author didn’t make that point clear. His message was a strict “don’t use them.”
[I wrestled with whether to use ellipses to indicate I clipped your quote.]
I agree people using ellipses as sign-offs in email are doing a dumb thing. When email was new some folks took to ending them with
###
on a line by itself. Which was apparently a holdover from teletype or wire service news reporting usage. Thankfully that died out.
One thing I noticed is that if you inadvertently put two periods after a sentence, Discourse will render that as 3 periods - an elipsis. As somebody who cut-and-pastes my sentence clauses around a lot before you ever see them, ending up with double periods is commonplace… I just dropped a double-period on purpose there to demonstrate. Finding and fixing them all before I post is a bear.
That is the gist of it. We are not talking about English papers here. As you can see above, we don’t even capitalize English anymore.
Texting has evolved among those who grew up with it as having its own dialect. Because of the spare form of expression, small subtle things take on more important meaning. A period at the end of a text is redundant finality. The text is over. No need for a period. If you add a period it is interpreted as a bit of slamming your fist down. I’ll bet everyone here reads all caps on an online post as shouting. It’s the same idea.
Ending with an ellipsis has loaded meaning within a certain community, whereas to those of us who first started texting when we were 35, not so much. I heard a podcast where a millennial got a text from his boomer boss saying, “Thanks for the presentation. Have a good weekend…” and the guy lied awake all night wondering what was wrong with his presentation. They brokered a discussion between the two and the boss had no idea at all that this was how it was coming across.
When you are communicating with someone, it’s your job to know your audience.
I can’t say I use formal quotes in texts much–even though I do tend to text in normal English more often than not. I don’t think it comes off badly if the whole text is capitalized and punctuated correctly. (And I also just don’t really text all that often, and only do so with people who already know me.)
But I do have a recommendation for snipping out a part of someone’s words in a quote. IMHO, it’s better to use brackets, to show that the ellipses are not part of the original text.
Prompted by this thread, I did a little reading on ellipses and I discovered something about them I hadn’t know.
I was always under the misapprehension that if you were being extremely precise, you were supposed to use a three dot ellipsis in the middle of a sentence and a four dot ellipsis at the end of a sentence.
I discovered this is not true. All ellipses are supposed to have three dots. The apparent fourth dot I’ve seen at the end of some sentences is actually a separate punctuation mark. What I thought was a four dot ellipsis was actually a three dot ellipsis followed by a period.
I also found out that there is not a consensus on whether there should be spaces between the dots. Some usage guides say yes; others say no.
