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Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Support Ellipsis Day!

My good friend Chuck suggests a new campaign topic for National Punctuation Day (here and here).

I'd like to suggest an addendum to National Punctuation Day - Support Ellipsis Day.  As you can tell, I appreciate commas, and I can be accused of overusing the ellipsis ..., but often the world could be improved by an additional ellipsis...
 What I left out there, with the "..." elipsis, was Chuck wondering "what is the plural of ellipsis?". That's ellipses.


I like the idea of campaigning for additional ellipses -- it has that not-quite-self-contradictory quality, like campaigning for added omissions,


What day should this be? Well, 3 dots is "S" is Morse code, "S" looks a bit like "5", so probably May 5th (5/5) would be good.  Or maybe September 3rd, with S for September and 3 for the 3 dots.  Or March 3rd (3/3)  What do you think, Chuck?

1 comment:

  1. Chuck7:52 PM

    I'm leaning toward March 1 for National Support Ellipsis Day. I use an ellipsis when my thoughts aren't quite complete...when there's need for a transition, but there's no transition to be had...maybe something was left out. On March 1 I usually wonder if there was a February 29th that zipped by when I wasn't paying attention. I like your suggestions of three dots leading to 3/3, or morse code leading to 5/5, etc. You put some thought into those suggestions, but an ellipsis usually means some lack of thought...weakness of transition... You'll never find a ellipsis in scientific studies. Intense congnition and ellipses (I like the plural!) just don't go well together.

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