Grammar was never a big thing in the secondary modern school I attended until 1970. There was I recall mention of full stops, capital letters and commas in the most rudimentary fashion, but words like preposition, parenthesis and ellipsis were to remain a mystery - even to our teachers.
Anyway, I digress. I recently purchased a copy of Grammar Rules by Craig Shrives and whilst thumbing through I happened upon this familiar pattern [...]. You will note that the brackets are square and not curly.
Craig explains that when quoting spoken or written words you can use three dots to show where parts of the quotation are missing. This is called an ellipsis.
E.g. Persons … with names like Sierra, Sequoia, Phoenix, and Rainbow can’t sing the blues no matter how many men they shoot in Memphis. (The text between
persons and
with is irrelevant. However the three dots show that text is missing.
You can also put ellipses in square brackets.
E.g I have no ambition to govern men; it is a [...] thankless office (Thomas Jefferson)
Maybe I’m being too kind to Roland, but if he made the simple mistake of using the wrong brackets what do you think was the information he intentionally left out? I tend to think it was an expletive fuelled tirade against 98 percent of his customers.
Original script here:
http://www.cafc.co.uk/news/article/statement-3009419.aspx P.S. As for curly brackets I found this (on the net) to be the most reasonable explanation.
Unless you are a physicist or a highly skilled mathematician, you are unlikely to encounter curly brackets in your research or reading. If you're a programmer, you would most assuredly use these bygone little squiggly marks. But much like Hypercolour shirts or wearing spandex shorts for anything other than biking, curly brackets have largely fallen out of fashion. But just in case you do encounter curly brackets outside of the above-mentioned fields, they are likely indicating a series of equal choices. For example:
Select your pizza topping {pepper, onion, sausage, tomato, feta, anchovies, bacon, sun-dried tomatoes, chicken, broccoli} and follow me.
The only other place you may encounter curly brackets is on forums or when instant messaging. In this context, they are used to indicate a hug. The way the curly bracket is facing indicates the direction of the hug. A curly bracket that opens to the right is a right hug and a curly bracket that opens to the left is a left hug. (Maybe Roland was simply offering a great big group hug?)
Comments
Perhaps we went to the same school?