Elipses & Double Spaces
Thursday, August 11th, 2022 08:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snoozefestaudioI saw a TikTok today that left me feeling all personally attacked, talking about how boomers (and I'm GenX) use elipses wrong, and their use of elipses is deeply triggering, because... everybody knows elipses are only meant as insults?
This was not news to me today... I have been hearing this complaint for years, along with the other complaint that old people use double spaces after periods.
And I've been silent on the issue, but... being that I am now linking to a blog from my TikTok, and expecting people to read it... I kinda have to chime in on these two topics.
But elipses first, since they seem the most controversial.
------------{=0=}------------
I don't think it's ever happened in history before, that a generation turned a punctuation mark into something offensive.
That's just not what punctuation marks are for.
But, millennials managed to do it, and now, whenever I type an elipse, what they see is, "you stupid motherfucker!"
Let's do a test paragraph in my writing style, as parsed by a person under 30.
My Writing Style
"I'm not hearing a lot of field crickets in my yard but... maybe the weather has something to do with it?.. hard to say."
How Millennials Read It
"I'm not hearing a lot of field crickets in my yard but, you stupid motherfucker, maybe the weather has something to do with it?motherfucker. hard to say."
--<>--
Read that way, the elipse is worse than a middle finger, which only says, fuck you, and instead actually conveys deep revulsion for the reader. Not only should you get fucked, but you are a stupid motherfucking idiot who everybody hates, and you know it!
When I commented on the Tiktok, about how an elipse can simply represent a pause, longer than a comma... I was answered by an avalanche of replies informing me that only the M-dash can be used for long pauses, and elipses always only represent unspoken words... probably of spite!
Seriously?.. let's look at that test sentence again with an em dash.
Proper Millennial Punctuation
"I'm not hearing a lot of field crickets in my yard but-- maybe the weather has something to do with it-- hard to say."
Okay so... no!
First off, that looks... English major reading F. Scott Fitzgerald levels of pretentious!
Second, that was not even an em dash I used. Why? Because third... THERE IS NO EM DASH ON MODERN KEYBOARDS!
I don't know what kind of 1920s style guide they were using to justify that bullshit but nobody has used an em dash since shoes had buttons!
Yes!.. it is true, that in modern professional journalism, you must use an elipse to indicate unwritten words, BUT ONLY IN THE CONTEXT OF A QUOTE!
So, for example, if the President says, "I hate to see dogs mistreated."
You can't quote them as saying, "I hate dogs."
You have to quote them, if you're an asshole, as saying, "I hate... dogs..."
But even that professional use of the elipse still indicates a pause! It does indicate other words were inside that pause, which are not written here, but nowhere does it say that the elipse indicates profanity or unspeakable malice.
I feel like Millennials would read such a quote as, "I hate motherfucking dogs, motherfucker!"
Where did they get this from?
They did this to themselves!
------------{=0=}------------
I feel like Millennials invented this convention of three dots meaning, "you stupid motherfucker," in their passive aggresive teen years, and now they want to hold the rest of us responsible for it!
Not only is that not how adulting works, Millennials!.. it's not how writing works!
The use of the elipse to indicate a long pause in an otherwise cohesive sentence or thought is well established in novel & comic book dialogue, where the elipse not only takes the form of [...] but also [?..] and [!..]
They are spacers, meant to signify the passage of three beats of time... without any subtext, much less offesnive subtext!
I mean really... to be seeing offensive subtext where there is none, and then crying foul about it, has a very Q-anon, Karen energy.
And to be doing that, about a punctuation mark... is beyond Karen. It's making Q look reasonable.
--<>--
Every writer or publisher will give you the same advice, which is, ignore the style guides and come up with your own conventions. As long as you're consistent, and what you have to say is interesting... it's legit!
Linguists says the same. Say it however you want to say it, but have some internal consistency, so that people can get you and... it's legit!
19th century grammar teachers will tell you that there's only one way to punctuate, and that, "ain't" is NOT a word!.. but even THEY, never went so far as to assert that misuse of an elipse, or other ancilliary punctuation marks, such as the semicolon... was tantamount to CURSING!
I mean, they did hate curse words, but they never said an elipse could become a curse... punctuation mark!
--<>--
Policing punctuation for it's offensive undertones is the business of tyrannical pedants, and stinks foul within the nostrils of free human beings!
--<>--
As for double spacing after the period... fine!
That may not be necessary in the age of hypertext Arial font, but we don't do that because we're evil.
For over a century, up until the mid 1990s, that was taught in high school typing class as a MUST!
Typing was considered a valuable professional skill, and typing class was an elective, but the double space was industry standard, and you would fail the class if you didn't get it imprinted into the muscle memory of your right hand.
They would do weekly speed tests, to assess your typing skills, and one of the first damn things you taught your right hand to do was hit that period with your ring finger, and follow it up with two quick taps on the space bar, with your right thumb.
It's involuntary.
It's not something you can expect all generations older than 30 to unlearn!
--<>--
I chose a mono-spaced font for this blog, specifically, so that my autonomic double spacing would make some sense.
It was a mono-spaced convention, because all the characters in a mono-spaced font... which all typewriters were, up to the dawn of the internet... take up the same amount of space, including the period.
The double space between sentences was necessary for people to parse what would otherwise be walls of text.
I mean, these were the days when whole damn paragraphs were only indicated by a bit of an indent at the start! No lines of blank space between one paragraph and the next! And God save you, if you tried to make one paragraph as short as a single sentence!
These days I almost never have a paragraph that is MORE than a single sentence, and they are ALL separated by a huge line of blank space, because I know that's the only way to write long form online that is in any way digestible!
--<>--
In the final analysis... and not at the end of the day, because the end of the day is overused, and the final analysis is not given enough love... punctuation is a kind of musical notation, meant to indicate the timing and pitch of actual speech...
And spacing is there to break things up into scannable, digestible hunks of language, so that you're not overwhelmed by a wall of text you have to decipher like hiroglyphs on a temple wall.
Double spaces are not indicative of flawed character, and elipses are not secret code for, "you stupid motherfucker."
------------{=0=}------------
This took me way too long to bang out tonight... in defense of my writing style, as a person with a link to this blog in both my TikTok and SoundCloud bios.
I have enough trouble getting any traction... as an idiot who is obessed with back yard field recording crickets and making canopy hoist winches out of scraps...
There is no chart of weirdos, autistic or not, that has me on it!
I was already gate-kept out of existence before millennials were out of their diapers, and I came to terms with that long ago.
But it does piss me off to think that if I could get some small following now... new generations are right there waiting to shut me down on the grounds of spacing?.. and the imagined profanity of three dots in a row?..
Get the fuck out of here! I have no apologies for you!
°¦}
https://soundcloud.com/snoozefestaudio
This was not news to me today... I have been hearing this complaint for years, along with the other complaint that old people use double spaces after periods.
And I've been silent on the issue, but... being that I am now linking to a blog from my TikTok, and expecting people to read it... I kinda have to chime in on these two topics.
But elipses first, since they seem the most controversial.
I don't think it's ever happened in history before, that a generation turned a punctuation mark into something offensive.
That's just not what punctuation marks are for.
But, millennials managed to do it, and now, whenever I type an elipse, what they see is, "you stupid motherfucker!"
Let's do a test paragraph in my writing style, as parsed by a person under 30.
"I'm not hearing a lot of field crickets in my yard but... maybe the weather has something to do with it?.. hard to say."
"I'm not hearing a lot of field crickets in my yard but, you stupid motherfucker, maybe the weather has something to do with it?motherfucker. hard to say."
Read that way, the elipse is worse than a middle finger, which only says, fuck you, and instead actually conveys deep revulsion for the reader. Not only should you get fucked, but you are a stupid motherfucking idiot who everybody hates, and you know it!
When I commented on the Tiktok, about how an elipse can simply represent a pause, longer than a comma... I was answered by an avalanche of replies informing me that only the M-dash can be used for long pauses, and elipses always only represent unspoken words... probably of spite!
Seriously?.. let's look at that test sentence again with an em dash.
"I'm not hearing a lot of field crickets in my yard but-- maybe the weather has something to do with it-- hard to say."
Okay so... no!
First off, that looks... English major reading F. Scott Fitzgerald levels of pretentious!
Second, that was not even an em dash I used. Why? Because third... THERE IS NO EM DASH ON MODERN KEYBOARDS!
I don't know what kind of 1920s style guide they were using to justify that bullshit but nobody has used an em dash since shoes had buttons!
Yes!.. it is true, that in modern professional journalism, you must use an elipse to indicate unwritten words, BUT ONLY IN THE CONTEXT OF A QUOTE!
So, for example, if the President says, "I hate to see dogs mistreated."
You can't quote them as saying, "I hate dogs."
You have to quote them, if you're an asshole, as saying, "I hate... dogs..."
But even that professional use of the elipse still indicates a pause! It does indicate other words were inside that pause, which are not written here, but nowhere does it say that the elipse indicates profanity or unspeakable malice.
I feel like Millennials would read such a quote as, "I hate motherfucking dogs, motherfucker!"
Where did they get this from?
They did this to themselves!
I feel like Millennials invented this convention of three dots meaning, "you stupid motherfucker," in their passive aggresive teen years, and now they want to hold the rest of us responsible for it!
Not only is that not how adulting works, Millennials!.. it's not how writing works!
The use of the elipse to indicate a long pause in an otherwise cohesive sentence or thought is well established in novel & comic book dialogue, where the elipse not only takes the form of [...] but also [?..] and [!..]
They are spacers, meant to signify the passage of three beats of time... without any subtext, much less offesnive subtext!
I mean really... to be seeing offensive subtext where there is none, and then crying foul about it, has a very Q-anon, Karen energy.
And to be doing that, about a punctuation mark... is beyond Karen. It's making Q look reasonable.
Every writer or publisher will give you the same advice, which is, ignore the style guides and come up with your own conventions. As long as you're consistent, and what you have to say is interesting... it's legit!
Linguists says the same. Say it however you want to say it, but have some internal consistency, so that people can get you and... it's legit!
19th century grammar teachers will tell you that there's only one way to punctuate, and that, "ain't" is NOT a word!.. but even THEY, never went so far as to assert that misuse of an elipse, or other ancilliary punctuation marks, such as the semicolon... was tantamount to CURSING!
I mean, they did hate curse words, but they never said an elipse could become a curse... punctuation mark!
Policing punctuation for it's offensive undertones is the business of tyrannical pedants, and stinks foul within the nostrils of free human beings!
As for double spacing after the period... fine!
That may not be necessary in the age of hypertext Arial font, but we don't do that because we're evil.
For over a century, up until the mid 1990s, that was taught in high school typing class as a MUST!
Typing was considered a valuable professional skill, and typing class was an elective, but the double space was industry standard, and you would fail the class if you didn't get it imprinted into the muscle memory of your right hand.
They would do weekly speed tests, to assess your typing skills, and one of the first damn things you taught your right hand to do was hit that period with your ring finger, and follow it up with two quick taps on the space bar, with your right thumb.
It's involuntary.
It's not something you can expect all generations older than 30 to unlearn!
I chose a mono-spaced font for this blog, specifically, so that my autonomic double spacing would make some sense.
It was a mono-spaced convention, because all the characters in a mono-spaced font... which all typewriters were, up to the dawn of the internet... take up the same amount of space, including the period.
The double space between sentences was necessary for people to parse what would otherwise be walls of text.
I mean, these were the days when whole damn paragraphs were only indicated by a bit of an indent at the start! No lines of blank space between one paragraph and the next! And God save you, if you tried to make one paragraph as short as a single sentence!
These days I almost never have a paragraph that is MORE than a single sentence, and they are ALL separated by a huge line of blank space, because I know that's the only way to write long form online that is in any way digestible!
In the final analysis... and not at the end of the day, because the end of the day is overused, and the final analysis is not given enough love... punctuation is a kind of musical notation, meant to indicate the timing and pitch of actual speech...
And spacing is there to break things up into scannable, digestible hunks of language, so that you're not overwhelmed by a wall of text you have to decipher like hiroglyphs on a temple wall.
Double spaces are not indicative of flawed character, and elipses are not secret code for, "you stupid motherfucker."
This took me way too long to bang out tonight... in defense of my writing style, as a person with a link to this blog in both my TikTok and SoundCloud bios.
I have enough trouble getting any traction... as an idiot who is obessed with back yard field recording crickets and making canopy hoist winches out of scraps...
There is no chart of weirdos, autistic or not, that has me on it!
I was already gate-kept out of existence before millennials were out of their diapers, and I came to terms with that long ago.
But it does piss me off to think that if I could get some small following now... new generations are right there waiting to shut me down on the grounds of spacing?.. and the imagined profanity of three dots in a row?..
Get the fuck out of here! I have no apologies for you!
°¦}
