Quote:
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.
Last edited by Homo Loquens; 12/13/05 04:04 AM.
