Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by hombre_fatal 1392 days ago
> Thanks for the issue....

> Thanks.....

Aside: Do people know that trailing "..." tends to communicate annoyance or sarcasm? I think the people writing it think it means something else, like some sort of intermission before the next thing they write, but I wouldn't include it in professional comms at all.

6 comments

I think it has a different tone to different people? I had a friend who used to put it after most messages and I thought they were upset with me until I asked. It was just how they wrote. I've also noticed more people using it to indicate a trailing off of voice, not necessarily with any annoyance emotion.
Maybe it’s a cultural thing cause even a trailing voice does communicates the same connotations of being upset. I know of only two buses of the triple dots: showing there’s more content in a quote or to express annoyance.
Some people use it to let an expression breathe a bit, modifying a period to be more like a paragraph break, or a paragraph break to be even a bit wider.

In some cases, that may represent emphasis, and might take it as an invitation to think on what was said because it was especially earnest or important.

In other cases, it might just a cleanser between ideas that don’t have a clear bridge.

> tends to

Online communication styles might be more diverse than you assume.

If something you receive feels stylistically out of place to you, you’ll get more value (and less frustration) by expanding your own dictionary rather than prescribing a narrower one to the author.

It's an age and geographic location difference. Young people see it as sarcasm, old people don't. Similarly in other countries its also not seen as sarcasm.
No, I don’t think people think that… because that isn’t what it means. People aren’t annoyed or sarcastic towards you… they are just pausing for a second.
I feel as though a comma and the end communicates a pause better. Especially since it use in formal English is similar.
Another name for ellipses (…) is “suspension point” and doesn’t have any true grammatical purposes, unlike a comma. A comma doesn’t necessarily indicate a pause and makes no sense to insert randomly… wherever you’d like the reader to pause.
For texting I meant specifically at the end of a sentence to indicate a possible continuation
My personal use for trailing ‘…’ is precisely to escape formal language and hint at something that is more complex or emotional than a simple pause.

For instance “Did you just…unplug and replug the machine?”

Ah I forgot about it’s usage ! For me it still takes on a negative connotation when used at the end of a sentence
It's like "loading....", but they are unloading.
My otherwise high-EQ boss does this all the time and it drives me bonkers.
I definitely think it's a generational thing, my mum loves ending sentences with '...' and honestly O don't know why. Reading it makes it seems like annoyance but I know that it isn't, so I don't know if it was just something they were taught?