Ellipses

54 replies

PassportPanicFuuuck · 18/01/2026 12:49

Why... do some... people... write everything... in a sort of... stream of... consciousness... way like this... instead of using... actual... punctuation...? Does anyone else... find it... really... annoying?

Surely it also takes longer to type?

(Yes, I know I'll probably be sent off to Pedants' Corner.)

OP posts:

Cluborange666 · 19/01/2026 14:46

PendantScorner · 19/01/2026 14:20

Are they people who are from countries where English is taught at schools?
I've worked with many people who have English as a second language and most of them have excellent English.
Those who have acquired their English by immersion, including British and North American people, tend not to.
The British and North American ones tend to only speak English (and have an annoying habit of using English to mean British) whereas the others speak English as a third or fourth language.

Edited

Show quote history

They are all South Asian.

PendantScorner · 19/01/2026 14:50

@Cluborange666 , I knew they would be! They tend to write in the local English and refuse to accept corrections to make the text acceptable as international English.

They also use !!! for emphasis.

MyThreeWords · 19/01/2026 14:52

I know - because I've tried - that I put things between hyphens too often

That habit was even worse for me, @Imlyingandthatsthetruth , on MN at any rate, because I was in the habit of using two hyphens on each side of the parenthesis to indicate an en dash. But try that on MN and the coding gives you an effect that you probably didn't anticipate!

Fascinating to hear about the full stop being interpreted by young people as aggressive. So is that why they stack up those weird Jenga towers of single-sentence texts?

And fascinating, too, to hear of ellipses being used to 'soften' utterances - and nonetheless sometimes having the effect of an ominous implied threat.

ruethewhirl · 20/01/2026 19:26

MagpiePi · 19/01/2026 13:36

I’ve recently found out that putting a full stop at the end of a sentence in a text or WhatsApp message is now interpreted as being aggressive, and I have reluctantly, mostly stopped doing it with younger people. However, it means that each sentence has to be a separate message which annoys the fuck out of me when I get them (I just send one paragraph and leave the last full stop off). Just put some bloody full stops in so that my phone isn’t pinging away 10 times in a row!

Show quote history

Yes, I’ve heard this about full stops. Crazy!

Flip

1 2 3