A home to endangered pied oystercatchers. The city is just visible in the distance.

What I saw on my bike ride this moring - a view through the bird-hide window.

Eclipse of the ellipsis: should you be worried?

Apparently, using an ellipsis marks you out as old-fashioned. I don’t know why. I suppose this is just the way fashions change. A newer, younger generation does things differently, and before you know it, that’s how things are done. The older people can’t keep up, or else don’t want to change, arguing that things were better in the old days.

So why not use an ellipsis? Well, what about the obvious reason: there’s no need to. Any sentence that previously would have ended with an ellipsis can now end with a full stop.

But here I should also mention that ending your sentences with a full stop is nowadays thought to be rude and abrupt, so I shouldn’t do it. Of course, all this punctuation advice is for ‘informal’ phone based writing like messaging and social media posts. Traditional writing can keep its traditional forms of punctuation. Except that people are decreasingly using anything other than phones, so traditional writing may be an endangered species.

So are we devolving into two forms of written speech? One for formal correspondence and long-form prose, the other for everything else? This may seem novel, but surely several languages have been quite successful with varying forms of writing depending on the circumstances. A famous example of a language that has multiple forms of written speech might be written Japanese, which has several different alphabets, to be used in different contexts. Another is Serbo-Croat (and maybe some other Slavic languages), which can be written in either the Cyrillic or Latin alphabets. (Or should I be referring to two distinct languages, Croatian and Serbian?) And then we rarely notice that in English we already use two fairly different character sets, depending on the context. Capital letters are written differently from minuscules, and you need to know both sets in order to write correct English. You might get away with only using capitals, but to the reader it usuallly comes across as too emphatic, or even ‘shouty’.

NO ENTRY. Works well in all-capitals.

I’M FEELING SAD. Doesn’t really work, it seems, except perhaps on Tumblr.

Nevertheless, we English speakers already use these two different forms of written speech, almost without noticing that we’re doing so. Must be horrible to learn, if this Latin script isn’t that of your first language.

Perhaps in future we’ll all become fluent in both writing and texting. Another possibility in the future, though, is that voice controlled text will become even more prevalent and writing will turn into nothing more than a transcript of spoken words. At this point, punctuation will become fully or mostly automated and we won’t need to worry about it. If this becomes the case, I expect the ellipsis to die out, and full stops at the end of sentences to continue, but automatically. When punctuation is automatic there are unanticipated consequences, though. For example, people now know whether you’re texting from the office (no automatic punctuation on the lap-top computer) or on the go (your mobile phone gives you punctuation by default).

It doesn’t bear thinking about…

Here’s a photo of where I live. It wasn’t sunny today though. Today we had nearly 10cm of rain. In American units, that’s bucketloads.

Want to read: Pirate Enlightenment by David Graeber 📚

I’ve long been fascinated by the idea that piracy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries included various forms of political experimentation. If piracy was a kind of organised crime, as Peter Leeson claims pdf, we might ask what the organisation entailed. Surely there’s more to it than a simply a series of experiments in contract theory (the ‘pirate code’). But calling piracy organised crime is a circular argument. Of course it was illegal, but very often pirates were doing what nations themselves sanctioned: comandeering enemy ships. The line between privateer and pirate was a faint one.

But for many of the poorest people, leaving home and joining up with the pirates would have been an attractive opportunity - the least bad option in some cases. Since there was nowhere in Europe that people could live free of despotic regimes, the high seas must have presented quite a few possibilites.

Certainly I’ve been suspicious of the designation ‘pirate’. It seems as much an excuse to torture and murder people who ask questions as the designation ‘witch’ has been. If you doubt that piracy might have been a convenient category to condemn your opponents, rather than an accurate description of their activities, consider this: the entire state of Texas was once condemned for piracy, having declared a republic independent from Mexico.

Besides the Republic of Texas, there were other experiments in nation-building, such as the Nassau pirate republic in the Carribean. But David Graeber writes of the fabled Liberalia, a semi-mythical location on the East coast of Madagascar, where pirates set up their own rule on land.

I think this matters because contemporary democracies are really nation states first, and only secondarily are they democratic. This priority, in my opinion, should be placed the other way round. Otherwise, state power tends to be defended, at the expense of democratic checks and balances. We need more democracy, not less. and this is difficult when the state sees itself as self-evidently right, whether or not it promotes democracy. As imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan says:

“Our idea of a democratic nation is not defined by flags and borders. Our idea of a democratic nation embraces a model based on democracy instead of a model based on state structures and ethnic origins.”

Finished reading: Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout 📚 This was an intriguing character study. Lucy Barton, a successful but quite damaged author, really doesn’t know herself. And then just occasionally, there comes a flash of brilliant, sensitive insight. This novel builds on two previous books about Lucy and her family. It feels as though we’re circling back and learning more and more about her. The past is very present for Lucy. She’s unable to shake off the imprint of her impoverished childhood, her feelings of invisibility, and her lack of self-esteem. Throughout this novel runs the question of whether we can really make choices in our lives or whether we just ‘do things’, as Lucy’s ex-husband, William, claims. I felt William had made plenty of choices in his life, and was using philosophy to avoid taking responsibility for them. Lucy, on the other hand, struggles to make her own choices, and seems to settle for letting others make them for her. It’s all very poignant.

Finished reading: Against Creativity by Oli Mould 📚.

This is a critique of everything symbolised by Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class (2002). Supposed individual flexibility, agility and dynamism are just a cover for the destruction of rights at work, leading to increased precarity. Capitalist creativity, in which everyone is supposed to see themself as a “creative”, is an attractive but empty rhetoric that increases the pressure to produce for exploitation. True creativity, on the other hand, involves “an emancipatory force of societal change” (p.46). The author points out that democratic governability is at best an afterthought, when it should be front and centre of consideration. “What if we asked one simple question before any new app, machine-learning algorithm, or smart city infrastructure were created: how can this be used and managed democratically?” (p.196).

The argument of this 2018 book is prescient in relation to the crisis of Twitter and the rise of Mastodon and the Fediverse in 2023. Could people really control their own communications channels, instead of letting petulent billionaires run everything (into the ground)? It’s too early to tell, but the signs are that there’s a new mood of discontent with “Big Social” and a search for more accountable alternatives. As Mould points out, the first step towards change is to start imagining how things could be different.

This book pairs well with Ariel Gore’s very different The Wayward Writer. Early on in this creative writing manual the author quotes Ursula Le Guin:

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”