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this post was submitted on 31 May 2024
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Asklemmy
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I saw some video where they explained boomers use the ellipses to indicate missing words? like they're acknowledging that it's a sentence fragment and not a complete sentence.
That's actually how the comment above interpreted the ellipses. The difference is more, why the words are missing.
The "modern" interpretation is that you are too annoyed or afraid to finish the sentence. In the sense of "son of a ...." in case of annoyance.
The "old" interpretation is either temporal (I'm not finished writing) or simply an acknowledgement that the fragment is just a fragment.
So the modern reader will interpret much more context into the missing words, leading to the exchange above.
That kinda makes sense because that is the how it is intended to be used (from a punctuation perspective).
el·lip·sis noun the omission from speech or writing of a word or words that are superfluous or able to be understood from contextual clues.
Hmm, I'd always understood ellipses to mean a thought was trailing off, or as a written indicator of someone thinking as if taking a pause while speaking.
I was never taught that's what it means, just seems that's how most people use it.
I think schools stopped teaching it at some point. Legal docs are one of the places that use it as originally intended. And, I guess, older folks.
Wikipedia ….
I usually use it as “a slight pause” in my attempts at jokes, or to abbreviate a quote
That's a little different: if you're quoting someone and cut words out of the middle of the quote, you'd use ... to indicate that you've modified the quote. It wouldn't go at the end of a sentence though. It used to be pretty common in newspapers, as I recall.
so why are they using it at the end of a sentence if it's not to indicate trailing off?
Indicating trailing off is another way to use it; that's more literary vs the newspaper thing of indicating removed words. I wouldn't expect anyone to use it to indicate removed words at the the of a sentence, because you could just end the sentence instead. But some people are weird.
I know that they're weird, but they're all doing it. there must be a reason. they must have been taught something in school