Alexander Kobulnicky

Conservatives might not like it, and prescriptivists can squeal, but the English language changes. We perceive it best in words, words being the most obvious part of language, and when the Oxford English Dictionary added “unfriend” to their lexicography, everyone took notice.

Less prominently, punctuation evolves too. Apostrophes mushroom and semicolons fade. Commas are substituted for periods and hyphens, and all of them move around sentences, serenely independent of the laws of grammar. But over the last few years, no punctuation has erupted like the ellipsis, a modest character formerly used to omit portions of quotes and carry out infinite sums.

If “unfriend” is a word for the internet age, then surely the ellipsis is its punctuation mark. On message boards, YouTube comments and Facebook threads, the ellipsis can be substituted at will. To break up sentences, to separate thoughts, to link phrases — it’s all we need.

I think the secret to the ellipsis’s success is its expressiveness. A comma doesn’t mean anything. We miss them when they’re gone, but in a semantic sense, they were never there in the first place. Periods signal that a sentence is over, but they don’t say anything about the speaker’s attitude. An ellipse conveys a sort of glib negligence, a sense that the writer is so tired of his own thoughts that he can’t bear to link them together in a more coherent way. If the exclamation point signals that the writer is excited about what he wrote, then the ellipsis signals that he is barely paying attention at all. And who is, on the internet?

Even better is the two-dot ellipsis (written as ..), which has so many deep layers of meaninglessness that it’s practically a short story in itself. It combines the boredom of the ellipsis with the carelessness of a typo. Did the writer mean to type a period? Did he mean to type an ellipsis? Anybody who would use an ellipsis as punctuation is probably blind to typos, but suppose he actually intended to type two dots? What might he mean by that? Anything?

It’s easy to say that Strunk & White are good enough for the ’10s, but with the popularity of the internet making more writers than ever, it’s just not possible to express new attitudes with old tools. You can say that the ellipsis is slipshod, apathetic, and ignorant — but that’s just who we are.