A cry for {hellip}
I’ve been out of town (that’s part of the reason for the yawning silence here), so I read this week’s Word column, by the redoubtable Erin McKean, on the boston.com website just now. And one line gave me a moment’s pause:
Someone, somewhere, is using [words like funner] with a disclaimer like "I know it's not a real word {hellip}"
If you read the print version, you didn’t see that {hellip} -- you saw (I hope) three dots, or ellipsis points . . . like these. I assume the {hellip} is code for ellipses, but with some crucial bit missing, so that what appears on screen is not the expected punctuation, but the command itself. It happens; just Google "hellip" for other examples, some in earlier Word columns.
There were two especially funny things about this hellip, though. First, that the phrase "not a real word" was followed by . . . a truly not-real word. Second, that the not-word fit the sentence so well: I took it, at first, as a mistyped "help!" -- the writer’s plea for indulgence in this use of a non-real word.
I’m not much of a neologizer -- with the dictionaries full of words I don’t know, I’m in no rush to coin new ones -- but in this case I’m tempted. Wouldn’t {hellip} -- or even hellip, without the curly brackets -- work nicely as slang for "I’ve just exceeded the limits of my knowledge, everything I say from here on will be just guesswork"? I for one would make good use of such a shorthand expression.
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I noticed this in a previous column, and at first thought that a misspelt "{ellip}" failed to be rendered. It seems, as you say, that this is not the case, but that {hellip} is parsed by the printer, but not in html. Perhaps I'm wrong in this, but I'm curious what the 'h' is for. Are there other ellipses that use different tags?
On a more purely typographic note, I wonder why it is that "…" (produced on my Mac with 'option-;') has a slightly intermediate spacing of the periods when compared to 1) hitting "." three times: "..." [this distinction is lost in the preview, but appears in the entry form] and 2) inserting a space between the periods: ". . ." Why engineer a separate character, which takes an eight character "{hellip}" (not counting use of the shift key) just to achieve this spacing?
I've been trying to figure this out all day, and was delighted to find what I thought would be an explanation. But, I'm more confused now than I was when I first read the column containing the" {hellip}"s.
Jan says: Sorry if I wasn't clear. The [hellip] is the command for the punctuation "ellipsis points," i.e. the three dots [ ... ] indicating material has been omitted. For some reason there's an error in the command, so instead of the dots, in the archived stories you're seeing the command itself. (I thought these would have been fixed by now, but apparently not.)
This blogger might want to review your comment before posting it.