looks like exactly one person agrees with us on this
who are you, mystery person
-F
re: our answer
@Felthry we almost never can actually type an ellipsis, so we just type four periods
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re: our answer
@packbat we do too, but one of those periods is the period and three of them are constituents of the ellipsis
-F
re: our answer
@Felthry right, yeah - we think of the last dot as being the period but yeah, three of the dots are an ellipsis and one is a period
- 🐲 (?)
@Felthry I don't do that, three dots are enough to end a sentence with
but also an ellipsis is a single Unicode character (…) so in digital text it should be unambiguous
@noiob we certainly don't use the unicode ellipsis, just three periods
and ending a sentence is always four periods for us
-F
@Felthry in German an ellipsis does double duty ending the sentence and showing something was left out
@noiob i don't think that's necessarily a german vs english thing as much as just, some people do four dots and some do three
-F
@Felthry well, either way three dots are not the same as an ellipsis, from a typesetting perspective
@Felthry Why would you not just use an ellipsis???
@zetasyanthis because it feels wrong without the extra period to denote that it's the end of the sentence? i dunno what the style guides say but when you end a sentence that trails off we always use four dots
-F
@Felthry we're not them, but looking at the Wikipedia page, we did see a circumstance in which we'd put the period first? and that is when the ellipsis represents omitted sentences, not a trailing-off at the end of one sentence
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@packbat It's not like it really matters which of the four identical dots counts as the period, though!
-F
@Felthry that's what made it such a cool poll question, though? because it doesn't matter and yet we had an immediate and strong opinion.
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@packbat having strong opinions on inconsequential things is an interesting phenomenon
-F
@packbat makes you kind of wonder where the opinion comes from
-F
@Felthry I mean, our logic is that [...] means trailing-off and [.] means ending an utterance - and you can't trail off after you've already stopped? So for us, it's "Words words words[trailing off][but that's an ending, not an unfinished space]", which is ellipsis-period.
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@packbat we kind of feel the opposite here, the [.] indicates the end of the sentence, the completion of all the semantic content, and the following [...] indicates the idea that there could be more but isn't
-F
@Felthry ...that's /fascinating!/ we can't even imagine it that way, we're gonna have to sit with that or something to figure out how to understand that
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our answer
we always thought the period was first and then the ellipsis for some reason?
it doesn't really matter though of course
-F