Ellipses and You. . .
/We need to have a chat, people writing internet comments.
On behalf of many good and decent citizens out there in the world, I would like to take a moment and educate you on a fun little punctuation tool called the ellipsis. Why, you ask? Well to put it simply it's because you're using it so fucking wrong it makes the rest of us want to go to your house and smash your keyboard over your hands until there is nothing left of either but a pulpy soup of letter keys and metacarpals.
The insult to people who weren't raised by jackals that is ellipsis use in internet commenting has gone on long enough. You don't need to put 8 dots after every complaint about millennials you cobble together under an article about avocado toast you didn't actually read, Sharon, you heinous shrew. They are called commas and periods, fucking learn when to use them.
I am not claiming my mastery over the written English language is impeccable, I'm like 80% certain I misused a comma before the name Sharon in a paragraph belittling a hypothetical woman for not using punctuation correctly. However, I do make at least a marginal attempt not to type like I'm slipping in and out of a coma between every sentence and want the reader to experience what that feels like through my use of punctuation. I don't think it's too much to ask that others do the same.
In case you are not familiar with the terminology, an ellipsis looks like this: ". . ." Three dots each separated by a single space. There is a lovely source you can check out here, which explains in what some might describe as excruciating detail exactly what the ellipsis is and how it is used. The TLDR version is as follows:
The ellipses in it's formal use is a punctuation mark that is used to annotate where something has been omitted from a quote. The informal or colloquial use of an ellipsis is the one with which we are going to be concerning ourselves. It is used to indicate when a thought trails off before it is finished, or that there is otherwise some marked pause or hesitation which requires something with more punch than your standard comma provides. It's like the pause for dramatic effect mark.
Here is an example:
"Six ellipses in three sentences is worse than. . . UGH!"
What is it worse than, person being quoted? Hitler? Adult-onset chronic swamp ass? Nickleback? We don't know specifically because of how you appropriately trailed off, leaving your thought incomplete before changing gears, but goddamn if we don't understand the emotion of helpless frustration you are currently feeling over some pigeon-toed jackanapes not knowing how to write like a civilized human.
So! Now that we all understand how to appropriately apply ellipses to our everyday internet commentinglet's look at some examples of people who are single handedly responsible for ruining society for the rest of us.
Let's start with our friend from the beginning of the post, why don't we?
Perfect example of somebody who doesn't know what the fuck he is doing around a keyboard but isn't going to let that stop him from trying to make people feel bad on the internet.
Sir, you wrote four sentences and ended three of them with ellipses. Why? Were you trying to give the reader ample time to recover from each of your fucking burns before continuing on to the next one? Am I supposed to be like "OH FUCK A RON WHITE ONE LINER FROM 2004 THIS GUY JUST SLICED MY FUCKING NIPPLES OFF WITH HIS RAZOR SHARP WIT HOW CAN I EVEN CONTINUE READING. . . Oh, thank God, he's incorporated some convenient dots forcing my brain to take what feels like an inappropriately placed pause while reading his comme-OF FUCK MY WAFFLES JUST AS I WAS RECOVERING FROM THE FIRST ONE HE JUST HIT ME WITH SOME FORREST GODDAMN GUMP SOMEBODY GET A MOP BECAUSE I JUST SPILLED MY GIBBLETS ALL OVER THE FLOOR FROM THE INTENSITY OF THE GUT PUNCHERS THIS GUY IS THROWING OUT ONE AFTER ANOTHER."
The only guess I can take as to why people use ellipses this way is that they think it gives each sentence more gravitas, not understanding that all it does is make the reader think the author is slightly less literate than a fourth grader who only scored in the 20th percentile for not writing like a fucking asshole.
In fact, the only sentence this person DIDN'T end with an ellipsis in the comment above was the last one which is in fact the only one he fucking wrote where it would have made sense! Not only did he select that particular sentence as the only one that somehow didn't need drama dots added to it, he didn't punctuate it at all. There are nine periods in that sentence you corndog, you couldn't have spared one more for the end of your thought? You've failed me, guy who is apparently mad at a person or group of people he considers stupid. You've failed us all.
Alrighty, you used the correct form of 'their' so credit where credit is due, but I have a lot of problems with this next one. In no particular order:
- You shouldn't be allowed to make your profile picture a sweet adorable puppy and then start herniating yourself yelling about fake news and democrats, it's false advertising. I don't like being lulled into a false sense of security by that 10/10 good doggo only to get purple-nurpled by the fact that the comment appearing next to it was written by a butthole.
- Demwits is a pretty ok burn, but the fact that they emphasized it demWITS instead of DEMwits the way they should have ruined the wordplay. Like, the part of the word dimwit that you replaced with 'dem' from democrats is where you place the stress when you make the pun, get it together, we're trying to have a society over here.
- One of those ellipses has four dots instead of three because apparently they weren't satisfied butchering their comment with the use of poorly placed pauses, they had to be inconsistent about it.
While those are bad enough, I could overlook it all if it weren't for this part:
Let me explain why this is an abomination through use of a visual aid representing exactly what "...LOL..." would look like:
Take heed lest you too should ever be inclined to write . . . LOL . . . in the fucking middle of a thought and come off as if you were kicked in the head by an emu at a petting zoo when you were a child.
I could go on for ages about how abusing ellipses in your internet commenting makes you sound like a half-assed Captain Kirk on a mission to boldly go where no one with at least a sixth grade reading level and any sense of self respect has gone before, but instead I'll leave you with what to me is the most perplexing question I find myself asking in all of this:
Why is it that you see ellipsis abuse used almost exclusively for the purpose of ranting about politics by far right people over 40 years of age?
I don't know if FOX news has some sort of weird subliminal messaging that makes people misuse punctuation but goddamn if it doesn't seem like 90% of the people I see do this are Gen X/ Baby Boomers typing their little fingers down to stumps, about liberal snowflakes beneath some Tomi Lahren video. Think about it. Have you ever seen this comment?
"The Large Hadron Collider is a marvel of science and technology.............. CERN is really pushing the boundaries of how we understand the universe around us.......who knows what we might learn........... from their research....Higgs Boson.....Amazing"
I certainly haven't. It seems like it's exclusively some red-in-the-face white person telling libtards to go fuck themselves beneath an article about how they made it legal to shoot endangered baby seals in the mouth because it will somehow help oil corporations oppress Native Americans or something. Always.
A comment calling someone disgusting because of the opinions they voice. The Irony was in fact missed completely by the author of this comment, who could not see it through all of the fucking dots
A Promising start towards disproving the theory that only far right wing-nuts are guilty of ellipsis abuse despite the use of a double negative. Hopes were dashed by sentence fragment number 3.
Also of note besides the RIDICULOUS use of ellipses is the equally NAUSEATING habit of ending all thoughts with a single rude adjective popularized by Donald Trump. A practice which assures readers you have so little confidence in their comprehension skills that you have to label your statements with a one word tag to make sure they know which emotion they are supposed to feel about the subject.
Whelp, that certainly is. . . something.
Hopefully we've all learned a little bit about how to use ellipses today and a whole lot about each other. Namely that there are a lot of us out there who are just the worst. Go forth now my children. Go forth and spread the gospel of being slightly less of a trash bag full of used bandaids. Do it for me.
Do it for us all........................................................................................
