From Dot Dot Dot founder, Katharine Hibbert
“Why are you called ‘Dot Dot Dot’?” We’re often asked, and there are three answers – one grammatical, one numerical and one personal.
First, the grammar. The idea for the name first came from the ellipsis, the ‘…’ you use when writing to indicate an intentional gap or break. A journalist would use a ‘…’ to indicate that they’ve cut some words from the middle of a quote, or a poet might use a ‘…’ to mark a pause. Given that Dot Dot Dot’s work exists to fill the intentional gaps that happen during regeneration schemes, drawing our name from the ellipsis seemed appropriate.
So why not ‘Ellipsis Property Guardians’, then? Many commentators on writing style, including George Orwell and Winston Churchill, argue that it’s better to favour shorter, older words over longer, newer ones. ‘Dot’ has its origins in Old English and was in use before 1150 according to the Oxford English Dictionary. ‘Ellipsis’ only appears in the language in 1570 – it’s originally a Latin word. And ‘dot’ has only one syllable whereas ‘ellipsis’ has three. So the rules of good writing supported my intuition that ‘Dot Dot Dot’ rolls off the tongue better.
Second, the numbers. The fact that our name has three dots fits well with the fact that we have three sets of stakeholders – property owners, property guardians and the wider community. It makes it easy to create a match between the words of our name and our visual identity, since we often want to emphasise the three groups we exist to serve, and how helping each one enables us to support all three.
The first dot is for property owners – by doing a great job of looking after buildings, we win more work, enabling us to house more guardians and preventing properties from lying empty and blighting communities. The second dot is for guardians – by recruiting excellent guardians and giving them inexpensive, well-managed homes, we make sure that property owners’ buildings are cared for and we enable guardians to give more time and energy to good causes. And the third dot is for communities – as we support volunteering and make neighbourhoods safer, we build relationships with new guardians and property owners.
And then third there’s the personal story of how I came up with Dot Dot Dot’s name, more than 13 years ago. I was working on the ideas that have grown into the organisation we are today, and I needed to call the project something so that I could tell people about it. Calling it ‘Dot Dot Dot’ felt right – it made sense for the reasons above, but the sound of the words also captured the tone I wanted to adopt.
I wanted to avoid words with a defensive or militaristic sound. We are proud to be a security company but the best way to keep buildings safe is for them to be lived in by people who care about them, even if it’s on a temporary basis. Responsible people will always address issues affecting their homes or their neighbours’ homes, and that is by far the most effective way to tackle crime and anti-social behaviour. A home that is lived in is much safer than one that’s boarded up and bristling with alarms so I was looking for words with a positive connotation, rather than an aggressive sound, to differentiate us from competitors providing hard security approaches.
Finally, to me, dots as a motif are cheerful without being silly, and that’s the way I personally like to conduct myself. More than a decade on, it still feels like the right name for the work we’re doing.
