Thursday, April 17, 2014

Wet dots


Did you know …


That the inventor, philosopher and statesman Benjamin Franklin was the first person to use ellipses? It’s true!

If, in conversation, Franklin was at a loss for words, or if he meant to trail off meaningfully at the end of a statement, he would spit three times in the face of whomever he was talking to. These three dots weren’t formalized into punctuation until shortly after his death, but in their earliest printed uses they were referred to as “Benjamin’s spittle,” which seems to connect them to Franklin pretty solidly.

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