Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2016 January 22

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January 22

Using an ellipsis to mark a parenthentical thought

"Thousands of IBM business machines ... critical to our nation's defense ... are at work for science, industry, and the armed forces"

In contemporary English, there are two main ways to mark a parenthetical. You can put it in brackets (like this) or surround it by dashes – like this – in a sentence. However, a lot of old adverts do something really weird ... like this ... and put ellipses around the parenthetical. There's a good example to the right, but I found a few others ("Free training ... with pay ... in the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps"). Was this ever an acceptable thing? Old adverts were pretty weird about ellipsis use. Smurrayinchester 11:40, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

It's often used to symbolize a "pause". In theory, the ellipsis is only supposed to indicate portions of text deliberately omitted, but it's had other "unofficial" uses. Just like the period (or full stop, if you're British) is misused for emphasis... Just. Like. This. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:12, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

I agree with Bugs. It is just meant to suggest a pause in speech. This usage of the ellipsis seems to have been a fad. It does feel dated in any case. Could this have had anything to do with the beginning of radio advertising? Both examples come from within a period of 7 years (1944 to 1951). I'd love to see more examples to get a sense of when it started and when it ended. The use of the period alluded to by Bugs (What. The. F-ck!) seems to have begun more recently (90s?). Could it have originated with texting? Has anyone seen it in advertising? I'd love to see real references. Google is not very helpful. It's hard to describe to it precisely what it is I'm looking for, so what I get is millions of links to descriptions of the "proper" usage of the period and the ellipsis! Give. Me. A. Break! Contact Basemetal here 17:14, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

I wish I could give you references, but I'm going to throw in some OR instead, because this is something I've thought about often. I think many of the conventions we see now started to appear as "the internet" grew in popularity - and here I'm including (particularly) Usenet (and frankly, what are most web forums today but endless re-inventions of newsgroups?), and chat rooms. As a lot of informal discourse moved from spoken interaction to written, there was a need to convey some more common speaking patterns, such as the elliptical pause and stressed words. A related theory that I have is that spelling errors abound in chat and text because we are mentally "talking", and go for how a word sounds rather than taking the time to think about careful spelling. Somebody with a lot more training and background in linguistics could probably write a thesis or two on all this. --LarryMac | Talk 15:30, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

You linked to the linguistic sense of elliptical constructions, but most of those don't use the '...' symbol. Our article on the orthographic symbol is at Ellipsis. It says the AP allows for pausing usage, and clearly indicates that style guides vary. As for OP and advertisements, these notoriously do "whatever" they want. See e.g. unnecessaryquotes.com for a whole catalog of one specific type of typographic abuse. Here's a few pop-cultural discussions of ellipses that OP might find interesting [1] [2]. SemanticMantis (talk) 19:42, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

How else would we illustrate a pause if, for example, we're trying to illustrate spoken language in writing? StevenJ81 (talk) 20:25, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

There's a few ways... but I think using ellipsis is fine for novels and plays and newspapers :) Just make sure you have exactly three dots, or someone will think you did it wrong. And in more formal contexts, we don't usually need to denote pauses. Comma is also used for pausing, in a sense, and confusingly it is used more commonly for elliptical constructions than ellipses are. If you're doing serious transcription for the purposes of clearly recording spoken language in print, you can do something like this:

ALICE: "I'm not sure <,> I think <, ,> I'll know the answer in 2.4 seconds <,,><&>3</&> Yes the answer is 'Tulsa'"

See markup conventions here [3], though there are a few other systems as well. SemanticMantis (talk) 20:48, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Somewhere, Victor Borge is having a good laugh. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:31, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

House of Representatives election vs. House of representatives elections

I know you guys don't meddle in disputes, but I (we) need advice on this.

How many elections are there, if the chamber has more than one district? Is it just one "House of Representatives election" or more than one "House of Representatives elections"? Is it correct to call a multi-district election as a "House of Representatives election"?

On a related note, if you're not using the name of the chamber to refer to an election, instead using the type of election, such as "general", "presidential", "legislative", "parliamentary" or "local": it's always singular, right? It's "parliamentary election", "presidential election" and not "legislative elections" and "local elections"? –HTD 13:40, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Anecdotal and CwthEng: I think election(s) to the one body or institution is generally singular - e.g. "general election", "parliamentary election", "federal election", whereas elections to multiple bodies or institutions would be plural - e.g. "state elections" (e.g. for multiple state elections), "local council elections" (e.g. for elections to local councils across the country held on the same day). --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 13:53, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. This makes sense. How about if the election is referred to by its chamber? For example if a "Senate" has multiple constituencies, is it a "Senate election" or a "Senate elections"? –HTD 14:17, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

At least in Australia, both seem to be used. See, for example, Australian Senate election, 1967, which uses both forms in the same article. Neither the UK nor Canada have an elected upper house, so Australian usage might well be taking its cues from American English. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 14:28, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Yeah that's why I used "Senate" as the Australians only seem to have an elected upper house in the Commonwealth that I know of. The I see that the article is at Australian Senate election, 1967 (singular); the US Senate elections are in plural form, at United States Senate elections, 1968. AFAIK, both Senates are elected in multiple constituencies (although with different electoral systems), so the plural vs. singular usage question is a good one. –HTD 14:33, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

I couldn't count the number of times I've changed articles on Australian federal politicians from "<something happened> at the 2013 elections" to "... election" (referring to a general election). Same for "<something happened> at the 2007 Senate elections --> election". When Australian writers refer to a single general election in the plural, they're confusing the many local ballots for specific seats with the one general election of which they all form a part. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:38, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

HTD: JackofOz's response gave me an idea - it may be that colloquially people speak of Senate "elections" for a single (set of) election(s) on the same day, but that this is informal. Wikipedia usage is probably not the most reliable indicator of formal usage - official or academic sources might be better.This article, for example, seems fairly consistent in using "an election" to mean all the voting that takes place on a particular day, even if (for example) many individual seats are contested. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 14:43, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

Many thanks for your takes in this. I've always thought that if you're describing the "type" of election, it's always singular, such as "presidential election", "general election", "legislative election", "local election", except for cases such as "local council elections", "state legislature elections", etc. If you're referring to the type of "legislature", it depends on how many "districts" there are: for example, "United States House of Representatives elections, 2016"; apparently, this shouldn't be the case. Does that mean that are U.S. article titles are wrong? Or is it some U.S.-specific usage that we're not aware about? –HTD 18:17, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

"Slepulja/Sləpulja" meaning, etymology in Slavic

As a child, I remember my mother's father (especially) exclaiming "Sle/əpulja!" when someone knocked something over. He spoke the Rusyn language, and I know that *slep- or something close is a root for "blind" that shows up in the three closest languages to Rusyn; Polish, Slovak and Ukrainian. I always took the word to mean "blindness/sloppiness" while my mother insists it is a broken back formation or folk etymology from "sloppy" into Slavonic that has no Slavic root. (She's not a very good informant, since she thinks zapati dweri also derives from English) I haven't been able to find anything closer to the word than the adjective, slepy, "blind". Can anyone suggest a true Slavic form close phonetically to "Slepulja"? (The /j/ = English y.) Thanks. μηδείς (talk) 17:51, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

The Serbian article sr:Слепуље corresponds to the English article "Hagfish".

—Wavelength (talk) 20:34, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Now you know Medeis: the zeyde was calling you guys a bunch of hagfish. Hagfish are notoriously clumsy. Contact Basemetal here 22:27, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

In Russian, although "слепуля" isn't a real word, the common Slavic root for "blind" is so well-understood that, in fact, https://www.google.com/search?q=слепуля brings a few hundred usages, each time as a nonce word for a blind person or animal. Your grandfather's usage may have been the same. --My another account (talk) 11:12, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

Is the -ulja suffix commonly used for that purpose in some Slavic languages? Contact Basemetal here 14:23, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

In Russian, it's a productive suffix for diminutives or terms of endearment. Don't know about other Slavic languages, though. --My another account (talk) 17:14, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

Interesting. It does not come to me as a complete surprise that it is a diminutive suffix that would be so used. I can't think of an equivalent suffix in English but in French I have the feeling the diminutive suffix -ouille could be used in the same way. Let us test that theory native or very fluent French speakers: suppose I say "T'as vu cet espèce de lardouille?" I've just made up "lardouille". What do you think I meant? Does it sound to you like a nonce word a French speaker could come up with? Curiously, probably by pure chance, French -ouille is not entirely dissimilar to Russian -ulja. Contact Basemetal here 19:25, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

To my native French ears, "lardouille" would work fine, meaning something like "little piece of lard". Your sentence could be construed as a play on "gros lard" which is the equivalent of the English "Fatso". --Xuxl (talk) 22:05, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

Excellent. The experiment worked. Contact Basemetal here 19:21, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

Curiously, probably by pure chance, French -ouille is not entirely dissimilar to Russian -ulja. -- similarly sounding diminutives are/were in use all throughout Europe: Latin had caliga → Caligula, German had Hans & Greta → Hansel and Gretel, Greek has μάνα/mana → μανούλα/manula... That's a lot to be attributed to pure chance! --My another account (talk) 12:46, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

The Greek suffix is not found in Ancient Greek so that one's out. (Say it comes from Latin.) We've got that suffix in Germanic, Slavic and Italic. PIE? Another interesting unanswered question: Serbian sr:Слепуље and Croatian hr:Sljepulje the words for the "hagfish". Do you think they are derived with the same suffix? Or could it be in that case a homophomous but unrelated suffix? Given that the words for the hagfish are different in all other Slavic language it seems there is some probability to it being some descriptive term or other. Given their degenerate eyes that are easy to miss I'd say there's at least some probability these words are built on that root. Serbian sr:Слепић and Croatian hr:Sljepić the words for Anguis fragilis or "slow worm" or "blindworm" are I'd say almost certainly built on that root (cf. one of the English synonyms) even though it's not clear to me what's blind about those guys. Contact Basemetal here 19:21, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

Unlike hagfish, these lizards have similar names in many Slavic languages: bg:Слепок cs:Slepýš křehký sk:Slepúch lámavý (both for "the fragile blind one") sl:Navadni slepec ("the common blind one"). No explanation about the blindness though. All the more surprising that the Scandinavians call it "steel worm", except for the Swedish where it's "copper lizard". --My another account (talk) 14:00, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

@Basemetal:: -ulja is a relatively uncommon suffix in Serbo-Croatian, but it is generally pejorative (or at best neutral) rather than diminutive: wikt:-ulja: Suffix appended to words to create a feminine noun, usually a pejorative for woman, animal, plant or object., e.g. Runaway Bride (film) has been sometimes translated as pobegulja. It is most productive in forming cow names (šarulja 'motley cow'), and several plant and animal names (kadulja 'common sage', drhtulja obična, torpedo torpedo). As My another account said above. I can imagine "slepulja" from Medeis's original post being ad-hoc coined as a mocking term. No such user (talk) 16:15, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

• Thanks for all the answers above, including the French. μηδείς (talk) 22:55, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

Wait. We're not done yet. Contact Basemetal here 19:21, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

Yes, see https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-ula and https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-le which show that the endings of words like nozzle, middle and nipple are cognate with the Latin -ula in "Little Boots" Caligula and ungula. μηδείς (talk) 20:35, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

I've checked Calvert Watkins and Mallory and Adams, but neither seems to mention these separately. (I am not sure about Watkins, since I used the search function at Amazon.) -Medeis

Thanks. You've got lots to tell your mom now! Contact Basemetal here 22:09, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

Yes, thanks, User:Basemetal, I spend most Wochenende mit meinen Eltern and I mentioned this all to Manoulia before I read these last comments. She accepted stoically that her folk etymology was due to linguistic interference from her prestige language, not her mother tongue. Plus, the slow worm is so cool, I would like to know how to introduce them as an invasive species. μηδείς (talk) 22:36, 25 January 2016 (UTC)