What is it about the text messages and emails sent by older people that make me feel like I’m having a stroke?
Maybe they’re used to various shortcuts in their writing that they picked up before autocorrect became common, but these habits are too idiosyncratic for autocorrect to handle properly. However, that doesn’t explain the emails I’ve had to decipher that were typed on desktop keyboards. Has anyone else younger than 45 or so felt similarly frustrated with geriatrics’ messages?
Yes! This is what I always associate with older folks texting or emailing. I use ellipses a fair bit for (my attempts at) comedic effect. Some older folks are using them on a whole different level, having this weird habit of ending sentences with them where most people would use a period or exclamation point. It can come off sounding very ominous.
“Bill is coming over.”
Okay, cool. Have fun with Bill.
“Bill is coming over …”
Grandpa, are you in trouble? What’s Bill going to do???
I’m old and i use ellipses frequently, but my family would understand that i mean -
Bill is coming over and you know i hate that fucker so please call or stop by to save me if you don’t hear from me in a bit.
I think your Grandpa is expecting you to infer something from the …
“What’s the matter?”
“Do you want me to come over?”
“Oh, great! And?”
“Oh, ok. Have fun, then. Tell Bill I said hi!”
I’m old and I use … to indicate that I’m gonna continue that sentence, but because I’m slow to write, I give you a chance to participate/continue. Especially if the sentence is going to be long.
Bill is coming over…
Well that nice.
…but I can’t stand the fucker.
Oh.
…from the what ??! say it, goddammit !
Well, I’m old-adjacent and I literally don’t think either of my grandpas so much as touched a cell phone or computer in their lives, but I get your point.
I saw some video where they explained boomers use the ellipses to indicate missing words? like they’re acknowledging that it’s a sentence fragment and not a complete sentence.
That’s actually how the comment above interpreted the ellipses. The difference is more, why the words are missing.
The “modern” interpretation is that you are too annoyed or afraid to finish the sentence. In the sense of “son of a …” in case of annoyance.
The “old” interpretation is either temporal (I’m not finished writing) or simply an acknowledgement that the fragment is just a fragment.
So the modern reader will interpret much more context into the missing words, leading to the exchange above.
That kinda makes sense because that is the how it is intended to be used (from a punctuation perspective).
el·lip·sis noun the omission from speech or writing of a word or words that are superfluous or able to be understood from contextual clues.
Hmm, I’d always understood ellipses to mean a thought was trailing off, or as a written indicator of someone thinking as if taking a pause while speaking.
I was never taught that’s what it means, just seems that’s how most people use it.
I think schools stopped teaching it at some point. Legal docs are one of the places that use it as originally intended. And, I guess, older folks.
Wikipedia ….
I usually use it as “a slight pause” in my attempts at jokes, or to abbreviate a quote
That’s a little different: if you’re quoting someone and cut words out of the middle of the quote, you’d use … to indicate that you’ve modified the quote. It wouldn’t go at the end of a sentence though. It used to be pretty common in newspapers, as I recall.
so why are they using it at the end of a sentence if it’s not to indicate trailing off?
Indicating trailing off is another way to use it; that’s more literary vs the newspaper thing of indicating removed words. I wouldn’t expect anyone to use it to indicate removed words at the the of a sentence, because you could just end the sentence instead. But some people are weird.
I am a younger millennial. I use ellipses all the time tbh. But I never use them at the end of a sentence like that. I tend to use them in the middle of a sentence often to break it up if it seems to long and I don’t want the formality of a semicolon.
Yeah, for me (an elder millenial), I use them in the middle of a sentence in the form of a dramatic pause, or sometimes at the start of a sentence in specific cases. I’m not saying any of this is necessarily grammatically correct (or that the boomers are wrong for how they use them), but this is just what feels closest to regular speech to me.
I’m old and almost never use ellipsis and I will correct everybody’s punctuation and typography as a matter of principle (at least in my own language, not being confident enough with English rules to do it there).
Also ellipsis is a single character: … (it does take 3 keys though)