Eclipses, Ellipses and Lisps.

There are things in modern, casual communication today, that I like to call texting lisps. One of them is the ellipses. Like Matthew J.X. Malady, I find that a person that uses ellipses, either uses them extremely frequently or extremely infrequently. And the bad ellipses habit described in the article What the ... is what I call a texting lisp.

I have a friend who has a bad ellipses habit. She uses ellipses ALL the time, and I'm not exagerating. It can be a happy text, a sad one, an angry one, an exasperated, stressed, or indifferent one, and the only thing they have in common is the ellipses, which she never fails to include. It gives all her texts a sense of insecurity, of indesicion. It's like she's open to other views. Like she's not sure how you will take it. I understand her ellipses as a way to cushion the impact whatever she is saying will have on you. A way to give her argument the benefit of the doubt, to emphasize that whatever remark was made is open for interpretation.

I'm not a particular fan of ellipses and I can confirm it is because of my personal hate for indesicion. But I understand how ellipses can work in other ways. And yet, when I do bump into ellipses, whether in a memoir, a novel or a text, they seem to exude the same aura of insecurity in what is being proposed or said by the narrator, the character or the person.

Ellipses seem to eclipse whatever is being truly meant. A way to cover up true intentions for fear of negative reactions from the receiver. Ellipses bother me so much, that with my friend with the bad ellipses habit, I am convinced I can sometimes hear her using ellipses when we speak face to face.

So in a way ellipses eclipse the truth and become a lisp. Atleast to me they do...

Commagain?

Comma this, comma that. Oh wow! I used a comma. But then again, I probably misused it. Or did I? Oh no! I did it again, like lovely Britney when she was young and somewhat innocent.

Despite the fact that Matthew J.X. Malady didn't use a single comma for his article Will We Use Comma's in the Future? which can indeed be considered to be a formal piece of writing, doesn't really mean anything. The same way that if I do or don't use commas for my blog post doesn't matter. Comma's exist, they are used, they are neglected, they are "being purged," as Malady claims, and yet they don't seem to make a difference.

This makes up my defiinition of trivial things that don't matter. Like a stranger gossiping about you or Icona Pop crashing their car into a bridge. I don't care, so why should you? And let me tell you something: I doubt comma's care. Let those who use commas use them, as long as they don't make a mess of their writing because of them.

The usage of commas depends on the writer, and the writer depends on his or her social context, their target audience, their purpose. Looking back to something that all students taking the AP Lang. course know about, (that demonstrates the vitality of commas in writing) is parallelism. How can parallelism, with a rhetorical purpose in mind, work without commas?

In the article it is claimed that media today doesn't leave room for commas, whether it's because they can cause misunderstanding in tone by making the user of commas seem less casual in a text or because there simply isn't any room for them in a sub-140-character tweet. It claims that they aren't a necessity for easier reading. But does this mean that commas are doomed to die prematurely? Because if comma usage ceases to exist in a couple of years, then I would denominate their (commas) death as premature indeed.

Also, I have a question for Professor McWhorter: are fashion and language that similar when it comes to evolution through time? Because regardless of the fact that I understand that they're both tools that are subjected to change based on human whims, they aren't things that I would ever think of pairing together to get a point across. It seems as ridiculous and absurd as pairing apples with celery. They're both vegetables, but they serve completely different purposes. The former are for keeping the doctor away by eating one a day, and the ladder for gaining negative calories.

I guess the comparison between comma usage and fashion caught me a little off guard. It seems unfair to think that the way we dress is as important as the way we write. An educated man with an outdated or horrible taste in shoes is more likely to write a brilliant paper than a prep school boy that dresses inmaculately. You don't have to be fashionable to write well.

And most importantly, you don't have to write just like everyone or anyone else. So in the end, if commas do die (which I don't beleive they will), it will seem to me like the loss of an opportunity to be different and unique in writing. Becasue commas are, like sentence structure and length variation among so many others, a tool for shaping most of the characteristics of language that we have seen in class: purpose, tone, register and rhetoric.

Oops! I did it again and again and again.
I used a whole lot of commas.
Sue me.