CRAIG CONLEY (Prof. Oddfellow) is recognized by Encarta as “America’s most creative and diligent scholar of letters, words and punctuation.” He has been called a “language fanatic” by Page Six gossip columnist Cindy Adams, and a “cult hero” by Publisher’s Weekly. An eccentric scholar, Conley’s ideas are often decades ahead of their time. He invented the concept of the “virtual pet” in 1980, fifteen years before the debut of the popular “Tamagotchi” in Japan. His virtual pet, actually a rare flower, still thrives and has reached an incomprehensible size. Conley’s website is OneLetterWords.com.
But if these are anti-ellipses --anti-matter ellipses-- showing how what was not there in the first place was left out, then the universe would gradually fill with our memories of tomorrow, our recollections of the future, the words between the emptinesses that we chose to leave out, the not-deer of deer not howling, camouflaging themselves behind the trees that are not there.
Silesius of Rhodes responds:
Optimism is a metaphysical disease. Poetry is the panacea sold in those funny little bottles. It's the alcohol in the panacea that does the real work. That's the generator of non-deer. The other stuff is closer to the coffee grounds of reality.
Guelmus adds:
Deer that "howl" should be seen by physicians. Those might be lycanthropic deer.
Gary Barwin replies:
Or perhaps the deer should be seen by 'pataphysicians. They are ellipsistropic deer, and we, seemingly always forgetting, our gap-toothed minds filtering the metaphysical riches of the world, are ellipsanthropic.
Silesius of Rhodes says:
When I see language in need of a haircut, I want to loan my Occam's razor out. This gentleman clearly has a Mint, but I'm not sure anything is legal tender that's coming out. When a metaphysical ship sinks, the war amid the waves is usually between the wits and the witless. The witless miraculously survive, because the wits are engaged in diving for the meaning below the wreck, or looking for the mermaid Public Transportation System. And the deer in question does not seem the least bit "ellipsistropic" to me. The ellipsis has clearly been inflicted upon the poor creature by the antecedent pronoun in the grammatical (and likely erotic) scheme of some hyperbolic (probably 19th century) purple prosateur or prosateuse. Harumph.
* Ellipses don’t merely omit superfluous words or mark pauses. Far from
it! In an astonishing number of cases, the ellipses illustrate a
narrative, inviting the reader to “connect the dots.” Learn more about Annotated Ellipses at Amazon.com.
