Back in the day, the San Francisco Chronicle had a columnist named Herb Caen. With the exception of eight years or so in the 50′s when he jumped ship for the Examiner, he wrote a daily column for the Chronicle from the 30′s until he died in 1997. He’s the one that invented the word beatnik. He called what he did “3 dot journalism.” As you know, because you followed the convenient link provided above, he called it that because his column was usually just a long series of short comments or news items or intimations of coming news items, broken up by a series of ellipses. (Good extra credit question: “What is the punctuation we usually refer to as dotdotdot really called?” ) It finally dawned on me today that that is where Twitter stole their idea from. (D’oh! Sentence ending with a preposition!) Good Tweeters (it’s really difficult for me to even type that “word”) are channeling the spirit of Herb Caen. I haven’t done any research, (I did use to read his column fairly regularly), but I would bet that in at least one or more columns he wrote about what he had for lunch. Also where
Middle school teaching: Five shows a day, 180 days a year.
