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...