These are some texts my mother has sent me:
‘They found a mole on my back . . .’
‘I think Janet may have been contacted by ISIS . . .’
‘Madeline, the guest room is haunted . . .’
For the reader’s peace of mind: the mole was benign, Janet has not been contacted by the Islamic State and the guest room, well, that remains to be seen. I’ve always accepted my mother’s overuse of ellipses as an idiosyncrasy of an elderly texter. But she doesn’t reserve the ‘. . .’ for ominous messages. When I told her the date I’d be returning for the holidays, she responded, ‘OK . . .’
What does that mean? Is she going to say more? Is my coming home for Christmas an imposition? Is there an autocorrect setting on her phone she’s unaware of?
It’s not just my mother. My older downstairs neighbor left me some pastries last week. When I texted to thank her, she responded, ‘Enjoy . . .’ Why not Enjoy period or Enjoy exclamation point? Did she resent the gift? Are the treats poisoned?
There’s an extensive online discourse on the Baby Boomer generation’s penchant for ellipses. ‘OK . . .’ ‘Thanks . . .’ ‘See you next week . . .’ Sometimes they’re a playful way to build suspense, sometimes a form of passive aggression, and sometimes they relay an implication: ‘You were going to call me back in 5 minutes and it has been 10 so . . .’ Draw your own conclusions here. But my mother’s use of ellipses doesn’t reveal a pattern or convey a tone. She’ll ‘. . .’ in good times and bad. Excited, pensive, disappointed or otherwise.
To further dissect my mother’s ‘OK . . .’
‘OK.’ = annoyed, ‘OK!’ = enthusiastic, ‘OK’ = neutral
A seasoned texter knows that colloquially the dot-dot-dot is a cliffhanger and its receiver should heed the punctuation accordingly. The connotation isn’t necessarily positive or negative, it just insinuates that more is to come.
Some linguistics scholars theorize that those born before the advent of texting utilize ellipsis as a space-saving method for informality or shifting sentiment. Boomers are accustomed to analog communication, a letter on paper, where space is limited and one cannot press ‘return’ to generate infinite writing real estate. A possible, yet unsatisfying explanation.
Ellipses were developed in literature to communicate a pause or omission. The word in Greek means ‘leave out’. Many respected writers employ ellipses to different ends: drama, fragmentation, etc. Virginia Woolf likes them. They mark her move away from Victorian prose and toward modernism. She inserts ellipses not as decorative punctuation but as structural devices. Where Joyce uses stream-of-consciousness to overwhelm with abundance, Woolf uses ellipsis to pare down, to suggest that what matters most may be what is omitted.
From Mrs Dalloway:
‘She felt somehow very like him – the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away . . .’
The semicolon already fractures the sentence, breaking between the rational (‘She felt glad’) and the irrational (‘thrown it away’). The ellipsis takes that fracture further. It refuses closure, resists moral conclusion.
It’s of course unreasonable to compare my mother’s texting quirks to Virginia Woolf’s prose. That ‘thrown it away . . .’ is deliberate. It speaks volumes. But in a way, my mother’s ‘OK . . .’ performs the same work, though unwittingly. Her ellipsis is a modernism of its own: the pause of someone caught between analog warmth and digital brevity. Like Woolf, she’s hedging against the limits of form, trying to insert tone into a foreign medium. What has become a signature of our parents’ digital awkwardness may really be their own adaptation to the medium.
Have I not been giving this generation enough credit? Are the over sixty crowd as intentional in their punctuation as Virginia Woolf? Enlightened even? It was a Boomer who invented the smartphone after all. Maybe . . .-ers know exactly what they’re doing.
To end this piece conclusively, to not have written the ellipses of essays, I texted my mother. Why, I asked, do you do this? She responded:
‘I don’t know . . .’
‘;)’
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