The supermarket in my neighborhood recently underwent a renovation, and the new storefront reads “Market … place.” The first time I saw the sign, I wondered what, exactly, the three little dots were meant to convey, and who had signed off on them. Odds are, whoever that person is, they’re of a certain age; my father, who just turned 70, loves to use ellipses: “we may never know where COVID came from … but whoever released it is out there … somewhere … watching our response and laughing with glee …” So does my elderly pal Liviu, who emails me frequent updates about the blockbuster movie he’s writing to fund his retirement in Romania: “it is a great script … with a story … like no other …”
Anyone who browses Facebook or random comments sections on the internet knows that older people, generally speaking, have a mystifying obsession with ellipses. We used to drink straight from the hose … Deb made her famous Jell-O salad … Grandpa had another stroke … doctors say he’ll never walk again … Like everyone else, I snicker whenever I spot the telltale three little dots, but the truth is, I’m a dirty hypocrite: I actually love ellipses. They’re so passé that they horseshoe all the way ‘round into stylishness, the punctuational equivalent of a mullet or a puffy dad sneaker. I’d like to say I used them before they were cool, but they’re not cool, and haven’t been for decades …
I’ve written with ellipses my entire adult life, my texts and work emails and personal correspondence slashed by little groupings of three dots like mucus sneezed onto a newspaper. I don’t remember exactly when I started using them, although I think it was sometime in college — I encountered them in a lot of the books I was reading, a friend and writer I greatly admired used them, and they seemed a very appealing way to write after several bong hits … at some point they just became hardwired into my writing style …
People hate them, and I get it — proper punctuation is, above all, a mark of respectability. Stringing your thoughts together with ellipses can seem slovenly, even contemptuous … People who type like this must not care what you think of them … which suggests that they place no particular value on your opinion … I’m aware of this perception. When I start a new job, I always amend my writing style to something more conventionally acceptable: The deliverables are attached. I’ve incorporated your edits. Thanks for clarifying! But within a few weeks, old habits reassert themselves: Steph thinks she’s better than us because she went to Dartmouth … be a shame if her yoga ball chair mysteriously sprung a leak … why do white people get Juneteenth off, makes no sense …
Ellipses may not be “correct,” but don’t they have the appropriate emotional affect for most of our communications?
Ellipses may not be “correct,” but don’t they have the appropriate emotional affect for most of our communications? “Here’s the document you wanted … let me know if you have any questions …” Seems to me that strikes the proper register, much more so than the preferred contemporary style of exclamation points: “Here’s the document you wanted! Let me know if you have any questions!” That’s just ghoulish … the dead-eyed exuberance of a youth pastor … Meanwhile, even the technically correct and theoretically neutral period seems unnatural by comparison: “Here’s the document you asked for. Let me know if you have any questions.” Monotone, overmedicated … This response was generated by a neural network …
No one thinks in fully composed, properly punctuated sentences anyway … this is much closer to how you experience consciousness … little independent clauses that trail off into a resounding existential silence before the next one lurches forth from the jumbled clothes-pile of your preconscious ... If I had any guts I’d quit my job … did I remember to turn off the iron? … that French guy who was ostracized for saying 9/11 was caused by blockbuster movie culture was probably right … damn, that girl looked like a blonde Monica Bellucci … maybe I’ll kill myself … the BLT is a very underrated sandwich …
I’m not the first person to think that ellipses are the perfect tool to convey something especially authentic about how we think and speak. By the late 18th century, ellipses were so ubiquitous in tabloids and popular novels that Jane Austen mocked them in her early work, and George Eliot cut them from her later books for fear of looking like a hack, according to Ellipsis in English Literature: Signs of Omission, the scholar Anne Toner’s book about the history of ellipses. But, over time, writers like George Meredith — who thought the novel should be “honestly transcriptive” — began to rehabilitate the punctuation mark, and by the turn of the century, the modernists had fully embraced ellipses as a ready-made medium for their themes of silence, omission, incommunicability, and the stream of consciousness, per Toner. Ellipses appear frequently in the work of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and T.S. Eliot, among others. One of the most well-known instance of ellipses is found in The Great Gatsby, used to convey the discontinuity of Nick’s drunkenness, and possibly to elide a sexual encounter between Nick and the “pale, feminine” Mr. McKee. None of the modernists loved ellipses as much as Virginia Woolf, who was so taken with the three little dots that, at one point, she wanted to title her first novel “The … Voyage Out.” (Literary genius notwithstanding, no boomer on Facebook ever deployed the three dots more awkwardly.)
To see the three little dots in their full glory, we must turn to the French modernist Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who at mid-century produced the definitive body of ellipses lit, a run of gutter picaresques so toxically misanthropic and anti-sentimental that he makes Michel Houellebecq seem like Lauren Groff. Céline is in disfavor today because he was a florid antisemite, a wormlike toady who groveled before the powerful, up to and including the Nazis, whose boots he enthusiastically licked during World War II in exchange for residence permits, traveling papers, and, as he cataloged in North, “blueberry tarts ... platters of éclairs … big thick bathrobes … platters of sandwiches … heaping! …white bread and butter!” He was also a literary genius, and his use of colloquial French (an intentional thumb to the eye of the Proust-worshiping literary establishment of his time), combined with his unrestrained deployment of ellipses, created one of the most distinctive literary styles of the 20th century. In his post-war trilogy of North, Castle to Castle, and Rigadoon, there’s barely a period or comma to be found. The style is hard on the eyes at first, but once you get used to it, you’re buoyed along by the ellipses, whisked from fragment to fragment, much like how Céline scurried from crumbling hotel to Vichy fortress throughout the war years. Here’s an example from Castle to Castle:
“We must scatter!” … the cavalry principle … “dispersed order” … how many of us were there under the arch, piled up against the abutment? … about thirty … I saw that Bridou was right … the bombs were coming closer … and closer … they’d be hitting the bridge pretty soon … after all … such incompetence was too good to last … but the whole group was very hesitant … […] … Here there’s one little detail … Madame Remusat and her daughter were lying in the muck, flat on their bellies in the muck … along the shore … a bomb crater … they’d come to pick dandelions … they were all covered with mud! … a thick layer … they must have been scared, scared … they didn’t move … dead or not? Maybe. Anyway, they were flat on their bellies … I never heard of them again … they lived at the other end of town …
Céline’s ellipses convey not so much omission as a state of intermingled anxiety, shock, despair, and exhaustion that we’d probably diagnose as PTSD today. (Céline himself attributed his writing style to shell shock he suffered in World War I.) There’s also an almost unbearable sense of intimacy between author and reader — Céline famously said “what interests me is a direct message to the nervous system.” His total reliance on ellipses forecloses the cheap little tricks used to construct the artifice of what we are told is “good” writing: the strategic period, the melodramatic line break, the syncopation of long and short sentences. Céline’s prose has been shorn of bone, muscle, cartilage — all that’s left is blood and marrow.
After Céline’s extravagance, ellipses largely fell out of fashion, and the three little dots descended into the humus of popular culture. When the scholar E.L. Thorndike conducted a 1948 survey of punctuation, he found that ellipses were most commonly used in Superman comics. Star Wars begins with an ellipsis (“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”), and today they’re typically used in press releases shilling essential oils and plot summaries for Netflix original movies to push a sort of flaccid, corporatized suspense: “Tom Cruise is back in MI9 … and this time the mission looks really impossible.” It’s no wonder that the philosopher Theodor Adorno regarded ellipses as the tool of a “brazen hack,” and the critic and semiotician Umberto Eco thought they denoted a “lack of confidence.”
Of course, ellipses are also used by (and associated with) baby boomers, who misuse and abuse them past the point of parody on Facebook, in emails, and across other swathes of the internet. “Back in my day we didn’t have antidepressants … we just killed ourselves … rap music … more like crap music …” Older people are clearly not using ellipses to build suspense, or to suggest omission. So what, exactly, are they up to? Are boomers the last keepers of the modernist flame, Deb from Sales and Uncle Rick upholding the legacies of Woolf and Joyce and Céline?
A 2006 study of Internet Relay Chats (basically an early form of group texting) conducted by linguist Joshua Raclaw sheds a little light on this generational tic. Raclaw found that people online used ellipses because they were “patterning their discourse after spoken interactions,” and that the ellipses represented “extralinguistic features” like gesture, intonation, eye contact, etc. that generally don’t come across in text-based digital exchanges. In that context, it was effective; interviews with other people in the chat rooms revealed that users who used ellipses were perceived as “attentive” and “actively listening,” and that other users “generally felt more comfortable with a speaker who adopted” an ellipses-heavy style. So in a sense, boomers are — or were at one point — using ellipses correctly, over-transcribing real-world cadence onto an online medium, like a tourist in a foreign country who ostentatiously nods and smiles, compensating for a deficit of intelligibility with a surfeit of humanity.
If omission invites interpretation, ellipses are as much a Rorschach test as punctuation.
This may explain why my fellow millennials tend to find ellipses so off-putting — digital natives don’t conceive of themselves as disembodied brains wandering in the ether, transmitting speech into an alien sphere. They’re just texting. The metadiscourse represented by boomer ellipses is just noise to them, though it’s interesting that younger generations apparently construe ellipses as passive-aggressive. If omission invites interpretation, ellipses are as much a Rorschach test as punctuation. To an insecure reader, periods may well come off as brusque, exclamation points as exasperated, and three harmless little dots as passive-aggressive. This generational neuroticism could also explain why ellipses are shunned but emojis are commonplace: they perform essentially the same function, except emojis are much less ambiguous.
I sometimes think ellipses are ripe for a comeback. They seem to me like the perfect vehicle to convey our fractured attention spans, the burden of our ambient fears (of climate apocalypse, of cultural decline and impasse, of being shot in a mall food court), the perpetual state of pique and outrage that we live in. But embracing ellipses as a literary style, à la Céline, would require privileging authenticity over respectability, of style over marketability, an unlikely ask in today’s thoroughly gentrified and risk-averse literary world. I guess it falls to me to keep the ellipses flame alive … my last empty gesture at rebellion as I sit tapping out little SEO-optimized Trojan horses of marketing copy, a freelance Sisyphus in the content mines … a thoroughly pathetic hill to die on, I admit, but don’t we all have our impotent little mutinies? As puerile as it is to shun respectability, it’s still marginally less contemptible than courting it. In the end, I choose to believe my ellipses are more Célinesque than Aunt Cindyesque … a brave act of punctuational defiance, nothing boomerish about it … I am a rebel, a keyboard subversive … do Minions have genitals …
Franklin Schneider is a writer …
