With no words wasted, one hears exactly where her interest falls away. Ramsay taking in a vast decorated poster in To the Lighthouse: “Each shove of the brush revealed fresh legs, hoops, horses, glistening reds and blues, beautifully smooth, until half the wall was covered with the advertisement of a circus a hundred horsemen, twenty performing seals, lions, tigers …”.
Consider a stately description, from Virginia Woolf, of Mrs. They convey the endless rovings of consciousness. They can be gently mysterious (as in this twilit reverie by Langston Hughes). But others allude to charged material with superlative restraint (as in Fitzgerald or Joyce). Sure, some ellipses feel hammy and overwrought. Yet this critique strikes me more as an argument against bad writing than it is an effective indictment of a particular lexicographical tool. (Think “ curiosity gap” clickbaiting, but more waistcoats and fewer sloth bears.) Adorno, noting the dots’ prevalence in comic books and trashy romance, argued that a “hack … must depend on typography to simulate … an infinitude of thoughts and associations, something does not have.” Penny dreadful scribblers and yellow journalists adopted the mark wholeheartedly, entwining its brand with high melodrama, cheap commercialism, and camp. Typing furiously, the blogger forgot to account for one thing …Ĭould the hackneyed use of ellipses … end it all?įitzgerald wasn’t the only early-20 th-century wordsmith to notice that an ellipsis could gin up suspense. Yet unbeknownst to anyone, there was a catch … Where Joyce’s ellipses suggest fracture or disjunction, the anticipatory ellipsis implies continuity, a world or life persisting independently of what appears on the page. Some writers and editors feel that no spaces are necessary. Newspapers, magazines, and books of fiction and nonfiction use various approaches that they find suitable. As the dog’s words trail off beyond the strip’s last square, those dots become the thread leading him out of the corner. With ellipsis: 'Today we vetoed the bill.' Although ellipses are used in many ways, the three-dot method is the simplest. But what’s especially great about Snoopy’s ellipsis is how it resists the very closure he fears. His final punctuation-not to mention the conditional “MAY have written”-adds a charming understated wryness to the punch line. The maid screamed.”), and then frets that he “may have written into a corner …”. Some-the kind a colleague calls “ellipses of anticipation”-are exuberantly, epically suggestive! Star Wars begins with one such dot dot dot: “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away …” (A more prosaic example of the anticipatory ellipsis might be the three blue orbs that appear on your iPhone when someone’s texting you back.) In a Peanuts strip, Snoopy types out a flurry of paperback clichés (“Suddenly a shot rang out.
Maybe Umberto Eco was right to decry the “ghastliness of … three dots.”īut not all ellipses are ghoulishly suggestive. Alfred Prufrock.” “ I grow old … I grow old …,” sighs the speaker, his life disintegrating along with the refrain.
Eliot, makes his punctuation similarly chilling in “The Love Song of J.