Do you see those three dots at the end of the Subject? They are called, as you know, an ellipsis.
Now, that I know, both in English and Italian it must consist of exactly three dots, although in informal texts some people often use an arbitrary number of them to convey a stronger idea of suspension. Incidentally, I never do.
Speaking of people, I have had exactly two "serious" relationships, respectively with one girl of approximately my age (actually, about one year older) and with one considerably younger (nearly seven years). Now, the former, who was used to write letters on paper and often used those multiple dots, tended to do so also e.g. in emails, while the latter grown much more in a cell phone and sms era, uses quite often just two dots in smses both for space saving and typing speed, and tends to do so in emails too, although there those constraints are not relevant at all.
Oh well, I know my statistical sample is quite small... but it's something I've been thinking about for a while.
Re:JFTR
blazar on 2006-11-19T14:00:02
Hehe, when I'm concerned about typography I always write
\ldots, but even if I didn't, my editor would do that for me. Unless I'm in math mode, for in that case I use amsmath's\dotswhich chooses the right dots for the given expression. Well, just to say something\ldotsTyping proper typographical ellipses
Aristotle on 2006-11-19T15:38:43
It’s Unicode codepoint U+2026.
In HTML and XML, you can represent it as “…” (or “…” – or “…” for “horizontal ellipsis” but only in HTML).
My
.vimrc says “ digraphs”, so that Ctrl-K ... 8230 . will produce a proper ellipsis. In gtk+/GNOME apps, you can enter any Unicode codepoint by typing it while holding down Ctrl-Shift. (But it should be avoided on use Perl as it is not (yet?) completely Unicode-clean.)
(Yes, I have also memorised a bunch of other codepoints, like U+201C and U+201D for the English curly doublequotes, and U+2013 and U+2014 for en- and em-dashes. I know, I know.)
