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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2229 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 7, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I remember distinctly having issues with this use of ellipsis when writing comments on forums back when I was but a wee lad in ye olden dayes of the World Wide Web 20+ years ago. No matter what sentence I wrote, it just felt better to end it with an ellipsis than a period, and I couldn't tell why. But when I encountered other comments using ellipsis like this, I could tell how terrible it was for readability and forced myself to just end sentences with singular periods even if every cell in my body was telling me to add 2 more.

I think it's the same sort of phenomenon as uptalk, where someone who isn't confident in what they have to say and wants to hedge their bets makes a declarative statement in the same tone as if it's a question. The ellipsis gives the sense that there's more to it there than what the person has stated, something left unsaid that shows that the person is still thinking and unsure about the contents of what they wrote. And I think that's more common among young people (and women, to allude to Skeletor's response below) than the alternative, which is why people notice it as a a phenomenon among them. So whatever generation is the youngest generation at the time will probably be seen as doing this.

I think the typical way Millennials and Gen Z signal uncertainty in their declarative statements is by dropping punctuation entirely ("Trump is a Nazi." sounds a lot more definitive than "trump is a nazi"), peppering them with Internet initialisms (likewise "trump is literally a nazi lol, but w/e idk") or textual recreations of uptalking ("umm, did you miss that trump is literally a nazi??"). I agree that this a phenomenon more closely associated with women and gay men than with other demographics. But in my experience, I haven't really encountered young people using ellipses in this context so far as I remember: with only a handful of exceptions I can recall, they're always used by people significantly older than me.

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