What is it about the text messages and emails sent by older people that make me feel like I’m having a stroke?
Maybe they’re used to various shortcuts in their writing that they picked up before autocorrect became common, but these habits are too idiosyncratic for autocorrect to handle properly. However, that doesn’t explain the emails I’ve had to decipher that were typed on desktop keyboards. Has anyone else younger than 45 or so felt similarly frustrated with geriatrics’ messages?
That’s a little different: if you’re quoting someone and cut words out of the middle of the quote, you’d use … to indicate that you’ve modified the quote. It wouldn’t go at the end of a sentence though. It used to be pretty common in newspapers, as I recall.
so why are they using it at the end of a sentence if it’s not to indicate trailing off?
Indicating trailing off is another way to use it; that’s more literary vs the newspaper thing of indicating removed words. I wouldn’t expect anyone to use it to indicate removed words at the the of a sentence, because you could just end the sentence instead. But some people are weird.