Requiem for the ellipsis...

[mynameisben]

The whole damn planet is going to hell in a hand basket and there are people fretting over. . . three little dots?

 

[TxRad]

The whole damn planet is going to hell in a hand basket and there are people fretting over. . . three little dots?

I.... Uh.... We.... Uh.... Yeah, as a matter of fact.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

"...if there were one", Bronzeage; let's not lose the subjunctive!

No, I wouldn't be looking for the imperative. I suggested it might be a variant, in this case, an interrogative. The point was that "light a fire" has a romantic and erotic meaning in English that it might not have in another language. To translate the denotation rather than the connotation might not give the same results.

This is really interesting to a geek like me, because it just so happened to be a study on the cross-linguistic meanings of temperature metaphors in different languages that led to the development of a whole new theory the mind called Embodied Cognition.

Some scholar noticed that all the languages he studied from whatever culture used the concept of coldness as a metaphor for emotional distance or aloofness, and he wondered why this should be. It was apparently wired into the human brain to associate coldness with these kinds of emotions, even though there's nothing particularly cold about a cold shoulder or a frigid look in the literal sense.

They started looking into the use of other types of imagery and they found quite a bit of consistency: heat is always associated with passion, hardness with stubbornness or resolve, darkness with sadness, light with joy. All these things which seemed to be no more than figures of speech were apparently universal ways of organizing experience: people generalize from physical sensation to abstract idea, and it's more than just a curiosity, it seems to be the basis of how the mind works.

Embodied Cognition is the theory that there can be no meaningful thought without bodily sensory input, and that feelings and sensations are critical to abstract thought. In other words, no body, no mind. The old mind/body dualism argument is a chimera. You can't have thought without a sensing body.

Even our laws of math and logic have their roots in our empirical experience that one object plus another object always equals two. Once we're convinced of that, we're ready to start abstracting that experience using the symbolic languages of math and logic to explore all sorts of places we can't directly sense. But it's not for nothing that kids look at their fingers to verify the results of their calculations. They need to feel the truth that 4 + 3 = 7.

Even our abstract concepts of good and evil are ultimately based on the bodily sensations of pleasure and pain.

Experiments in Artifical Intelligence were suggesting the same thing, but from the opposite direction. I'm on shakier ground discussing the AI take on Embodied Cognition, but from what I understand, if you want to instill purposeful behavior in a device, then you have to provide it with feedback, and the more types of feedback you provide it with, the faster it will learn and the more adaptable ("abstract") that knowledge will be.

Those little robots engineers make to creep around the floor and bump into walls as they learn their way around the lab learn much faster if they're equipped with visual and auditory inputs in addition to the basic touch sensors. It's not just a matter of more input. More sensing modalities enable higher levels of abstraction: they qualitatively change the nature of the machine's "thoughts."

So I think that's pretty cool, that such a profound discovery should come from some word geek's curiosity about the use of metaphors in other languages.

 

[trysail]

The ellipsis will never die...

The punctuation mark that's really the most in danger is the poor, misunderstood semi-colon: half comma, half colon, it's too genteel and refined for the modern rough-and-tumble prose world...

... the rules of grammar are a lot more difficult and inconsistent than the laws of ballistics.

Um..., er..., uh..., I agree; the ellipsis is immortal.


I do love the semicolon; it is positively elegant. For fear of being adjudicated a dummkopf, I'm not going to reveal just how many decades of formal education were required for me to finally comprehend its correct usage. Once I gained that knowledge and concomitant confidence, I discovered tons of places where nothing else will suffice except a good old semicolon.


The laws of ballistics are "settled science." Should you find an exception, you are all but guarantied a Nobel Prize. Grammar, on the other hand, is mutable and lies in the realm of the liberal arts, innumerates, free thinkers and English majors. Following a couple of generations of "text speak," I expect ordinary English sentences will be as impenetrable to you and me as Beowulf.

 

[sr71plt]

[I do love the semicolon; it is positively elegant.

I do use the semicolon a lot in the narrative. Never in dialogue. Peole speak in short, choppy sentences or sentence fragments. So, although I don't try to replicate actual speech in dialogue, if there are short, related sentences in there (which is what a semicolon is for), I just let them be two sentences--or I use an em dash to connect them.

 

[Xelebes]

Semicolons have found new live as emoticons, ;p ;D ;o

Hm, which could raise possibilities here for making a sarcasm mark that we so desperately need in the written form.

Why don't you go over there and do it yourself;?

Why don't you go over there and do it yourself?

Why don't you go over there and do it yourself!


Hmmm... Hmmm...

 

[Cold_Eyes]

I'm not a grammar Nazi who obsesses over split infinitives, but one mistake that really annoys me is ellipsis abuse. It makes anything very difficult to read, as if you're starting and stopping at every sentence. I've seen stories where ellipses will be about as common as a period and even a few recently that used some very unorthodox punctuation (e.g., "!..." or "?...").

Besides making the regular narrative seem halting, it ruins dialogue when overused. This is the reason that it annoys me so much: It makes everyone sound like William Shatner. This, obviously, ruins the atmosphere in an otherwise well written story.

I'll demonstrate. "'Oh yeah...baby...I'm gonna...cum,' he said. 'Because I'm a...rock...et...man. Burnin' out my fuse...up here alone.'

'And I think...it's gonna be...a long...long time,' she said."

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Agreed. That is definitely abuse. The ellipsis has its proper place and usage but them ain't it!

 

[sr71plt]

Oh . . . I . . . . don't know about . . . that. . . .

 

[mynameisben]

So that's how the Rocket Man lyrics go. Wow. Was I ever wrong.

 

[Tio_Narratore]

I do use the semicolon a lot in the narrative. Never in dialogue. Peole speak in short, choppy sentences or sentence fragments. So, although I don't try to replicate actual speech in dialogue, if there are short, related sentences in there (which is what a semicolon is for), I just let them be two sentences--or I use an em dash to connect them.

I commonly speak in compound/complex sentences, often with implied semi-colons.

 

[Tio_Narratore]

Hm, which could raise possibilities here for making a sarcasm mark that we so desperately need in the written form.

Why don't you go over there and do it yourself;?

Why don't you go over there and do it yourself?

Why don't you go over there and do it yourself!


Hmmm... Hmmm...

Why don't you go over there and do it yourself?

 

[TheeGoatPig]

I'm not a grammar Nazi who obsesses over split infinitives, but one mistake that really annoys me is ellipsis abuse. It makes anything very difficult to read, as if you're starting and stopping at every sentence. I've seen stories where ellipses will be about as common as a period and even a few recently that used some very unorthodox punctuation (e.g., "!..." or "?...").

Besides making the regular narrative seem halting, it ruins dialogue when overused. This is the reason that it annoys me so much: It makes everyone sound like William Shatner. This, obviously, ruins the atmosphere in an otherwise well written story.

I'll demonstrate. "'Oh yeah...baby...I'm gonna...cum,' he said. 'Because I'm a...rock...et...man. Burnin' out my fuse...up here alone.'

'And I think...it's gonna be...a long...long time,' she said."

It just needs some adjustments to fit with normal speech rhythms.

'Oh yeah baby... I'm gonna cum...'

Sometimes you want your characters to speak like their speech is broken up by their heavy breathing.

"Oh... God... This is awesome!"

 

[manyeyedhydra]

The punctuation mark that's really the most in danger is the poor, misunderstood semi-colon: half comma, half colon, it's too genteel and refined for the modern rough-and-tumble prose world. One publisher I know won't accept semi-colons at all because they think they intimidate and confuse readers. They want them all replaced with em dashes.

I (mis)use those all the time to try and make my writing look cleverer than it actually is

 

[Rumorhasit13]

See I actually use ellipses a lot when I type. Really, I use the -1 ellipses.. like that. See? I don't know why, I just do.