...

Lately, i've been noticing a heavy use of ellipsis punctuation by the punctuation illiterate, when ellipsis is entirely not appropriate grammatically, and something like, say, a comma or even a period or even (gasp!) a transistion between thoughts might be called for.

Freakish thing one: This usage might be contagious via frequent email. i believe it has been spread to just about the entire company i work at by one individual.

Freakish thing two: Evil spawn of bad ellipsis. The punctuation ,,, has been invented! I believe as of yet it is confined to email conversation, and has not made its way to official memos or literature. However, my gut feeling is that there is something terribly malignant about ,,,.

For example, in Netscape, Edit/Preferences... will open the Preferences dialog.

There is a bit more to the correct use of the horizontal ellipsis (Unicode 0x2026, HTML entity #133, the venerable option-semicolon a Mac).

When used to indicate the ommision of one or more sentences, as in a quotation, it should be preceeded by a period and a space, as in "First sentence. Second sentence. … Fifth sentence."

Much as it is used in set abbreviation: {0, 1, …, n}

The message that inaugurated the planet Earth as a radio civilization, one hundred years ago today.

Three dots are the Morse code letter S. It was transmitted from Poldhu in Cornwall, and received by Guglielmo Marconi in a hut on Signal Hill in Newfoundland, on 12 December 1901:

It was about half past 12, when I heard three little clicks in the earphones. Several times they sounded, but I hardly dared believe. The electric waves that were being sent out from Poldhu had traversed the Atlantic, serenely ignoring the curvature of the Earth, which so many doubters had told me would be a fatal obstacle.

He had experimented with short-distance radio communication before, with one message sent the 200 km from the Isle of Wight to the Lizard Peninsula, on 23 January that year. But the transatlantic transmission, with signals bounced off the ionosphere, proved that the entire planet could be spanned.

Celebrations and reconstructions are taking place in Cornwall and Newfoundland.

I just wanted to point out that the use of "..." is not a new invention but was used in the 1800's!