This post title appears very interesting when it's got an ellipsis in it...

A friend of MC Hammer's, Pa' Trula, recently complained that a man, a love interest for that matter, had not replied to an email she had written him. Yes, maybe it was just an innocent mistake on his part, but there was an aspect of this particular lack of replying that was very unsettling to MC Grammar.


The fact is that Pa' Trula explained that she had signed off her email with an ellipsis. And this means that a very, very serious grammar misunderstanding had occurred.

But firstly, what does an ellipsis do? Well, it has multiple uses. An Ellipsis is a three dots, one after another, like this,

...

The Ellipsis is always three dots, no more. Try to resist doing a long line of dots. The Ellipsis indicates omitted words in a sentence, like this,

The disgraced football stars described the woman who made the allegations as a 'total... dishonest person'.

It can indicate a pause in speech, such as


My thoughts wander all the time...I can't seem to concentrate. I feel...strange.

Or an unfinished thought


On the other hand, I did thoroughly enjoy some of U2's early hits...


The ellipsis can be simply to omit unnecessary or inappropriate material, such as in a news article. Or it might be used to imply something more, so that the reader fills in the gaps. For example,

Usually I wouldn't have done it but it was such a nice night and I had plenty of wet wipes...

So we can see that the ellipsis indicates more information that, for various reasons, has been omitted. It's grammatical code for 'we had sex' or 'gratuitous abusive slander once lived here' or just 'Eh? Eh?' If the Ellipsis was an expression, it would be this one.



It's highly suggestive of information that is not there.

Even the Mona Lisa has a distinct ellipses-ness about her. See?



We get the feeling that information is missing. Just like an ellipsis.


But brothers, sisters, the ellipsis doesn't stop there, and this leads us to why Pa' Trula was so upset in the first place. An arguably more modern use of the ellipsis is to invite response. When Pa' Trula finished her email with this sentence

I'll leave it up to you to suggest something to do on the weekend...

She was extending this unfinished suggestion to her gentleman friend. And he seems to have misunderstood that the sentence was for him to complete, like a lost grammatical puppy, begging to be taken back to it's appropriate grammar home, where a hot meal is waiting for it. Because, in addition to the images we have already seen, the ellipsis is also this expression,




Waiting, listening, expecting. In person, if Pa' Trula's love-interest had not responded to her statement, it would have looked like he had a sight deficiency, so outrageous and obvious would have have been that he couldn't interpret the expression on her face. And yet in an email, he has not understood the true meaning of the ellipsis, and yet another potentially beautiful thing has been ruined by a poor understanding of grammar. Don't let it happen to you!