I was just doing little micro-editing of an email written in English by a German professor (who speaks impeccable English, but English has a crazy learning curve: easy to get to good enough, nigh on impossible to reach native-level), and along the way I struck out a couple of ellipses. I mean, I love ellipses, but…
There’s something so tempting about a good ellipsis. It’s a way of hinting at something without spelling it out, waving vaguely in the direction of things better left unsaid. Ellipses can feel almost magical, a way of breaking out of the confines of language, of saying one thing and meaning another. Which of course makes them a great tool for expressing implicit irony (“of course you and I both know that what I am saying isn’t actually true…").
My favourite maestro of the ellipseis is Pynchon, who sprinkles them liberally across everything he writes. Here’s the first paragraph I saw when I opened Gravity’s Rainbow at a random page:
oss … oss
And just the name! Ellipsis! A piece of punctuation that gets elliptical and eclipse thrown in for free – how can you not love it?
And yet, here we are:
Or rather, here we’ve been for a while now. That meme was created at least five years ago, by internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch. McCulloch wrote the excellent book Because Internet, about the myriad ways in which the internet has changed language.
And it’s true, ellipses don’t feel good any more. In fact they feel… wrong.
But why?
Most obviously, there’s just the usual whatever you do, don’t imitate your parents type stuff. But I think there’s more to it. Ellipses elide information, theatrically brushing the unsaid under the carpet in a manner that ensures no-one can possibly miss what you’re doing. Which makes them inherently showy, and therefore uncool. So that’s one part of it.
But then there’s another part: ellipses imply that some things don’t need to be made explicit because we all understand. Which means that we’re all coming from the same place, the same set of assumptions. Which we aren’t, not any more. Or actually let’s face it, not ever – but for a long time western culture happily ignored that fact. So you could say that the ellipsis is a tool for denying difference. The vague hand waving does double duty as a way of warding off alternative narratives.
And that is a good reason to consign them to history.
Fortunately, another doublewide piece of punctuation with a lot less baggage has come to the rescue— the ellipsis is dead, long live the em dash! Goodbye implicit, hello irruptive.
