Ellipses Are … Your Friend.

The humble ellipse has several purposes. It’s not just for avoiding punctuation any more! Though it still fills that need admirably. I picked up an issue of THE HIGHWAY EVANGELIST at a truck stop on I-80, many years back, and one feature that would have caused Mark Twain to prick up his ears was bad poetry of a pathetic nature. The alert reader has already tumbled to Twain’s fondness for mawkish funerary verse, and this was a near cousin to it.

The epic in question was arranged to look like verses. I don’t recall that it had much in the way of rhymes or meter. What stays in my mind was the choked sentence fragments, separated by roaming trios of periods. “She was…just a child…” Line after line of half-chewed partial sentences, disgorged randomly. I’ve seen other vox pop publications that seemed to accept whatever was sent in, provided it avoided bad language, and bad language wasn’t the only thing they avoided. Good language was pretty scarce, too.

Of course, ellipses are handy for sharpening up a quote to reduce meandering, improve focus, and change the meaning to something that will sell your movie or can of beans or whatever. Moreover, they will serve the same functions when you wish to represent the ideas and stands of someone who’s on the opposite political side from your own. Really skilled operators can even do it with audio or video of the opponent, particularly if luck is on their side and all that is required of them is to cut away the exculpatory parts of a phrase before and after the apparently incriminating nugget.

Then, there is the ironical use of the ellipse, which doesn’t even seem to be an ellipse at all when you look at it closely, which is why I refer to the formation instead as The Three Dots of Irony. Many a prose writer, unhappy that words on a page can’t convey the rise of the eyebrow, the hopeful smile, the whimsical shrug that says “I’m being humorous. Please laugh now!” The pronunciation of the Three Dots could, therefore, be similar to an actual laugh: Ha, ha, ha.

My experience goes back to the 70s, in print fandom, where jolly raconteurs, unhappy that their physical aspect was no longer part of their narrative, took to adding the three dots after remarks intended to convey humor in order to imbue it with irony and a hint of self-mockery. Often, they managed to convey also that despite his best efforts, the speaker was a windy bore who tended to finish each sentence or paragraph with an appeal to the listener to agree or affirm what has just been said.

The “Joke over; laugh now” purpose is supplemented nowadays with emoticons, bright little fuzzy dots of color which, in some media, contain a hovertext that might explain what word they’re standing in for. Many convey no information, but are overt requests for a particular reaction, most often laughter (but sometimes tears).

In the 70s social writers in apas and fanzines experimented with brief text cues whose usual purpose was to deflect an adverse reaction to some facially hostile sally or witticism, so that such things could be said with (hopefully) less consequence. S,AS stood for “Smiling, Always Smiling,” and meant something akin to “I was just riffing when I called you that awful thing, and I hope you won’t be so gauche as to insult me back!” NS,N was somewhat unusual in that it stood for “Not Smiling, Not,” and actually amounted to a writer confirming their being invested in what they’d written, rather than the expected nimble dance away from it.

Today’s writers have their preferred way of doing the same thing, with “/s,” representing the supposed closing of a mythical ‘sarcasm tag’ or ‘snark tag.’ By throwing in an actual label that disowns the words they just wrote, they have reached a new plateau in laughing at their own joke out of fear that their sarcasm is insufficient for a reader to detect without a helpful marker. The same people sometimes bemoan the lack of A sArCaSm FoNt (see what I did there?), because its nonexistence leaves them faced with the horror of having to either write sarcasm well enough that most people will get it (you won’t get everybody to see it, since RW cranks never tire of the delirious joy of pretending not to understand sarcasm when someone else uses it), or to not make the joke that was begging to be unleashed on a humor starved world just seconds ago.

So they’ll either make a quip that’s a standard thing someone on the Right might say, then punch it up with the SARC tag so we all know it’s funny, or they say something so vastly exaggerated (often well past humor) and then suddenly worry that they haven’t gone far enough, so they slap the tag on there to compel laughter.

Correct essay form is demanding that I end this article on an ellipsis… but nerts to that.