I've noticed a new style introduced here by maygodbwidu and tuhin; that of ending every sentence with a series of dots.......... is this a text-messaging convention? And if so, why?
Thanks [/trying to keep up with the young folks]
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I've noticed a new style introduced here by maygodbwidu and tuhin; that of ending every sentence with a series of dots.......... is this a text-messaging convention? And if so, why?
Perhaps ellipses – like Emily Dickinson’s multiplying dashes – symbolise the synapses engaged in analogical flashes of cognition.
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Thanks [/trying to keep up with the young folks]
It's way too late for that :
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Death on the Installment Plan (1936) by Louis Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961) introduced the stylistic innovation of using ellipses and apostrophes to capture the rhythm of everyday speech.
Columbia University Press, P. McCarthy (1976)
But there's your real answer.
Louis Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961)
Céline, somewhere (maybe in one of his last three books), has a little mock paeon to his three little dots. Amongst his anti-Semitic, anti-American, and anti-French rants ...
I use them when I want the reader to continue the thought themselves...
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I use them when I want the reader to continue the thought themselves...
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Death on the Installment Plan (1936) by Louis Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961) introduced the stylistic innovation of using ellipses and apostrophes to capture the rhythm of everyday speech.
Columbia University Press, P. McCarthy (1976)
These are perfectly good explanations of the use of a single ellipsis, or even extended ellipses embedded in a sentence. The question was about the use of extended ellipses at the end of a sentence.
> extended
ah, I wasn't counting...
> spoken...
...and the conversation carries on anyway...
ASp asked "is this a text-messaging convention?" I'm no txt dmon, but I doubt this explanation, since most keypads require you to access the full stop (period) marker by using about three key strokes ~ since the essence of txt tlk is brevty not wt, this would seem counter-intuitive, na?
> counter-intuitive, na
whaddya want? consistency?
On my cell, in txt mode, 2 get . press "1" ky 1x
and to drop in moisture, 1 move?! huh, mighta known there'd be more variants than I have seen, but.
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and to drop in moisture, 1 move?! huh, mighta known there'd be more variants than I have seen, but.
"Twas the same on my old phone, too, from a different manufacturer. Maybe it's market-specific?
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> counter-intuitive, na
whaddya want? consistency?
extended ellipsis already counter-intuitive
whaddya want? consistency? Hey, it just occurred to me, we could found a new school of thought, the
consistentialists 
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whaddya want? consistency?
Hey, it just occurred to me, we could found a new school of thought, the consistentialists
Not *this group
Self-proclaimed dead-thread proclaimers notwithstanding, thanks, mav. You did attempt to directly address my question, which remains unanswered. Maybe one of the dotty ones will reappear to explain the significance.
Given that text messaging is, for the time, the province of youth, I suspect that the main significance of the extended ellipsis is that it is non-standard. The same observation applies to the great prescriptivist divide.
A friend of mine does this in e-mail. I've just asked her, and she says it's because with more dots she wants the reader to think longer. As in:
"She disappeared with John for two hours the night of the party... Not that I'm going to ask her what happened, you know..." is different from:
"She disappeared with John for two hours the night of the party............... Not that I'm going to ask her what happened, you know................." Can you see any difference?
> think longer
Good call, Marianna ~ sounds likely.
Though it might be more effective so: "She disappeared with John for two hours the night of the party... Not that I'm going to ask her what happened, you know..........."
I guess I need to 'splain myself better.
So why doesn't anyone ask her? .........................
> 'splain myself better
sorry if you felt mantled, Wodge - but in fairness I thought Marianna was making explicit the possible difference being attempted by someone choosing <......> in preference to just <...>. And TEd's post implies a whole nother question... where does a query or exclamation sit in relation to such extended pawses...?...!
Could it be a countermeasure to truncation? If part of the end is cut off in transmission, nothing very essential is lost.
To mention a biochemical analog (once more): many genes have "long terminal repeats" at their end, which tend to grow shorter with generations. Their function hasn't been completely explained so far.......
> mantled, Wodge.
zok. considering the difficulty I'm having thinking about further description for this, I think I
do really need to learn to 'splain my self better. something about hand gestures, and etc....
and sieb, interesting thought. and I just like saying "countermeasure to truncation"..............
I got what you were getting at early on, dear patê-never-chopped-liver eta. What *I'm trying to get at is we have two new members, both of whom use this convention and some of the word-shortenings typical of txt mssg. Is this a current stylistic thing? I know there's nothing new about it, having messed around with punctuation most of my -- er -- creative life.
Marianna's example was interesting, and may be getting closer to the current phenom. And Uncle Werner's biological analogy makes sense to me, too..................
*some of the text-message styling seems just too.. cute for words.
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*some of the text-message styling seems just too.. cute for words.
NO! NO!
2 qt 4 wds
tsuwm said:
> just too.. cute for words.
not unlike your new avatar.......
>[my] new avatar.............................
is there for the intended purpose of.. no, I mustn't reveal that yet.
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A friend of mine [...] says it's because with more dots she wants the reader to think longer.
But even then wouldn't it be necessary to use multiple ellipses "... ... ... " with spaces?
I don't think the "extended ellipsis" is a text messaging convention at all. It is just a corruption, like the egregious use, so popular at AWADtalk, of the asterisk to mark out certain words (relax, *jocose* banter). As has already been pointed out, the engine of invention for text messaging is economy of expression. Having to press a key 15 times just to finish a sentence doesn't satisfy this requirement at all.
But there is another explanation for the excrescent ellipsis which does satisfy the law of the conservation of energy: The offending poster is simply holding down the Period key until a satisfying number of dots have appeared. Keeping an ellipsis to three dots by this method would be a miracle of hand-eye coordination.
Maybe it's not an ellipses at all, but a row of dots. After all, a dot isn't a period.
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Maybe it's not an ellipses at all, but a row of dots. After all, a dot isn't a period.
While we are on the subject of heterodox punctuation use, is there a term for that emphatic use of a period after every word in a sentence to create a (highly effective, I think) staccato effect? For example :
Oh. My. God.
Or :
Worst. Movie. Ever.
stopatto?
(and yes, I agree it's effective!)
> is there a term
I don't know, I'll ask my periodontist.
> stopatto
heh.
neither ........, nor .......... gets any ghits........whatever!
...just a corruption, like the egregious use, so popular at AWADtalk, of the asterisk to mark out certain words... This post will help you on your proscriptivistic journey for *truth, Homo Loquens 
> will help you
or *not, one!
On the other hand we certainly *are egregious in this usage since the herd does not follow this convention.
Perhaps it is the result of another period shortage such as
Steve Martin reported on a few years ago in The New Yorker.