Ellipses are the sluts of punctuation

I heard this phrase in some TV show somewhere at my sorority house one time, and it has some truth to it, if an ellipsis brings to mind the drawn-out breathiness of seduction.  And, for me, it does that. 

Sometimes. 

Most of the time, though, ellipses sound like the breathy uncertainty of someone thinking.  Or transitioning between thoughts, or trailing off.  Which is what they’re used for.  But when they’re used in place of commas, or periods, or literally any other punctuation, they sound stupid because that uncertainty wedges itself into that ellipses and doesn’t make any sense.  Punctuation is what makes text readable.  It’s what makes it come alive, what lets the reader picture someone actually saying it.  So when punctuation is misused, it effs up the flow of a piece of writing—and reads, in the limited voice of my imagination, as if someone were reading it AS IT’S WRITTEN.  Which sounds ridiculous.  Misspellings translate to mispronunciations.  Wut, cuz—they sound to my brain like someone who doesn’t know how to say those words.  And ellipses sound like the speaker.....

forgot what she was saying.

Some examples:

“What are you doing…” 

Is this a question?  Obviously, but minus the most important aspect of a question—the mark.  This ellipsis seems like the speaker trailed off in the middle of a thought—and there’s more to the question—or that it’s not a question at all.  Which sounds weird.

“Beautiful…”

This bothers me, again, because of the way it sounds in my head.  An exclamation point is more suitable to express an EXCLAMATION, which is what this is, in reality; the ellipsis, again, seems like the speaker trailed off in the middle of a thought, or is so taken aback by the subject’s beauty that it’s left him breathless.  Except that it was a comment on Facebook, which makes the former impossible (since the speaker could still concentrate enough to type the ellipsis) and the latter silly for the same reason. 

The ridiculousness of the fact that, as I sit here, drinking Earl Grey tea from a Big Ben mug, writing in English about English punctuation on my American Laptop, I’m sitting in my kitchen in Viterbo, Italy, is not lost on me.  At least I’m about to eat some pasta (with homemade sauce!).

Ciaooooo.