OK, this is gonna seem frivolous. But hear me out. We know that language is a dynamic medium, and that a living language undergoes constant change. One source of change has always been generational: younger generations do not use the same words as their generational elders, and as a result, the language enriches itself by adding new words, phrases, and coinages, and by adding shades of meaning to existing words. The beat generation of the 50s, the hippies of the 60s, rap and hip-hop, all have made their marks on our language.
But what I'm asking about in this post is a seemingly innocuous punctuation mark, the ellipsisbold text ( … **) As a member of an older generation, I used the ellipsis in company e-mails to indicate that I hadn't made up my mind about a topic or question under discussion. As in "I Don't have an opinion right now, and I to think about it …" I used it frequently enough that it became a kind of stylistic trademark for me, a way of indicating that I was keeping an open mind.
But I learned recently that younger folks seem to have a problem with the ellipsis, that they feel threatened by people who use the ellipsis in their e-mails, and that the use of the ellipsis makes them uneasy. This seems to be particularly true when there's a difference in power between the sender and recipient of the e-mail. NPR recently had a story about a corporation where a group of younger employees actually staged an intervention to convince their superior to stop using ellipses.
So, here's my question to you all: Is this really a thing? Do any of you react to ellipses in this way?
