Language Overflow

Don't tell me that he disappeared in a tornado!

Anonymous

Oh, no, nothing like that.

Phew!

Anonymous

12:01 PM

He never had any storm related injuries.

Anonymous

But he passed away due to something unrelated.

Aww

Anonymous

Quite young, too.

Too bad.

I can only imagine how scary real tornadoes are.

Seeing them in TV or movies makes them look less scary.

But I think it's similar to floods. Floods don't look that bad until you're in one.

Anonymous

12:06 PM

Tornadoes can move very quickly.

Anonymous

They don't always. Sometimes they hold still.

Floods beat all records in terms of deaths (casualties?).. but they are not exciting to watch, unlike tornadoes

Anonymous

They make this anvil-looking shape.

Stunning Time-laps of Supercell over Black Hawk, South Dakota

I thought it would be symmetrical!

Hmm... they didn't include the eye in the diagram.

Anonymous

12:10 PM

►

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. Oh, well, that thing isn't a tornado. The tornado is the little thing down at the bottom forming underneath it.

Oh, my holiness!

Beautiful.

I guess it could swallow a town easily.

Anonymous

I think that, in theory, tornadoes can form almost anywhere. But I also think it's really quite uncommon in most places, and there are only a few parts of the world where the conditions allow tornadoes to be particularly common.

12:15 PM

See my "Up next" list! I think that shark is smiling!

Anonymous

And one of those places includes good portions of the Midwestern United States!

Anonymous

Have you ever seen a waterspout?

@snailboat I remember seeing some tiny tornadoes in Crimea, but these were mere toys compared with the US ones.

@snailboat I think it only happens in the US, but I could be wrong.

@snailboat I'm not sure if what I've seen is called a waterspout. I think I've seen it once, only once in my whole life.

@snailboat nope, only a kettlespout (0;

Waterspout Tornado in Oldsmar, Florida - Tampa Bay 7/8/13

12:17 PM

There was one at first, then two, then three, and we went back to our hotel.

What's strange is that I can only remember the watespout pillars, but I can't remember where or when or even with whom I saw them!

Anonymous

►

But I remember that the friend who told me to look at the waterspout was male.

Funny how my memory works.

@snailboat That's very up-close!

Anonymous

The people filming it aren't scared at all!

Oh, do you know naga?

Nāga

Nāga (IAST: nāgá, Burmese pronunciation: [nəɡá]) is the Sanskrit and Pali word for a deity or class of entity or being, taking the form of a very great snake—specifically the king cobra, found in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism. A female nāga is a nāgī or nāgiṇī. == EtymologyEdit == In Sanskrit, a nāgá (नाग) is a cobra, the Indian cobra (Naja naja). A synonym for nāgá is phaṇin (फणिन्). There are several words for "snake" in general, and one of the very commonly used ones is sarpá (सर्प). Sometimes the word nāgá is also used generically to mean "snake". The word is cognate with English...

Anonymous

12:25 PM

'serpent'?

I recall in some Kipling book there was a Nag or Naga

Yes!

Anonymous

I probably learned that word from some game or fantasy novel when I was young. They're in Dungeons and Dragons :-)

In Thai, we call the waterspout "naga playing water". :-)

In the story of Mowgli, there's "Kala Nag", a black snake.

Anonymous

12:27 PM

@DamkerngT. I see! :-)

Ah, "kala" (กาฬ) = black!

Wow, I use ฬ so often that I can't remember where its key is!

I don't know what ฬ is or what it's key is, but Google Images shows a lot of pretty girls when I search for "ฬ"

Eh?

Try it out!

Interesting! ฬ is only a letter in her name!

12:31 PM

Maybe it's part of a girl's initials!

I guess it's because she's the most popular girl at the moment who has ฬ in her name.

ah

ฬ is relatively rarely used.

Anonymous

Oh, so when you wrote "so often", you meant something like "so seldom"?

@snailboat Yup! :D

12:39 PM

@CopperKettle Nag and Nagaina are the enemies defeated by Rikki-tikki-tavi in the story which bears his name.

@StoneyB Yes, a great story, and very popular in Russia.

Oh, that's a classic!

My sister says that in India not very many people even know the story.

In Russia it's popular due to there being a good cartoon.

aw cuddles

Hmm... is it mongeese or mongooses?

12:41 PM

There also was a good vinyl disc recording (LP record?), I had one as a kid. (0:

mongooses it is!

I believe that until very recently Kipling was avoided in India, because he was regarded as the literary spokesman of imperialism.

ah

Too bad that cartoon has no English subtitles

> An ichneumon, Herpestes griseus, common in India, and well known for its ability to kill venomous snakes unharmed. Also applied to other ichneumons (subfamily Herpestinæ); in the form Mungos the word has been used in zoological Latin as the name of a genus (now Crossarchus) of this subfamily. The proper plural form is mongooses, but mongoose, mongeese, and other variants are occasionally used.

RIKKI TIKKI TAVI, 1965, cartoon, USSR (with ENGLISH subtitles)

►

12:43 PM

Because:

(this has English subtitles!)

> mongoose, mungoose /ˈmɒŋguːs/, /ˈmʌŋguːs/.
Forms: 8 mongoes, -goos, mungos, 8–9 mungoos, mongooz, -goz, 9 mongous, mungoose, (pl. ? erron. mungoes), 7– mongoose; β. 8–9 mangoust, (-oost).

Etymology: a. (? through Pg. mangus) Marathi mangūs (Telugu mangisu, Konkani mungasa, Canarese mungisi). The β-forms are from Fr. mangouste.

It wasn't a word that originally had an i-mutation plural like goose.

Betcher wonderin what an ichneumon is, or how to pronounce it. :)

@tchrist I am!

Oh, I guessed wrong!

Egyptian mongoose

The Egyptian mongoose (Herpestes ichneumon), also known as the ichneumon, is a species of mongoose. It may be a reservoir host for visceral leishmaniasis in Sudan. == Range and habitat == This mongoose can be found in Egypt, Spain, Portugal, Israel, and most of sub-Saharan Africa, except for central Democratic Republic of the Congo, western South Africa, and Namibia. It has been introduced to Madagascar and Italy. In Europe, it occurs mostly in the Iberian Peninsula, where it would have been introduced during the Arab occupation (which lasted, in whole, from 711 AD through 1492 AD, though more...

> A small brownish-coloured slender-bodied carnivorous quadruped, Herpestes (formerly Viverra) ichneumon, closely allied to the mongoose, and resembling the weasel tribe in form and habits. It is found in Egypt, where it feeds on small mammals and reptiles, but is especially noted for destroying the eggs of the crocodile, on which account it was held in veneration by the ancient Egyptians. (Also called Pharaoh’s Rat, and formerly Indian Mouse.)

> (With the early fabulous accounts cf. cockatrice, = calcatrix, in origin a L. translation of ἱχνεύμων.)

/ɪkˈnjuːmən/

12:48 PM

"In Egyptian mythology, Ra would metamorphose into a giant ichneumon ("over 24 metres") to fight the evil god-snake Apopis."

The Egyptians would've filmed Ichneumon instead of Godzilla then.

I know it from the insect.

> 2. A small parasitic hymenopterous insect (family Ichneumonidæ), which deposits its eggs in or on the larva of another insect; upon which its larvæ feed when hatched; an ichneumon-fly.

The name had been already applied by Aristotle to ‘a small kind of wasp that hunts spiders’; partly from which, partly in reference to the old stories as to the entry of the mammalian ichneumon into the body of the crocodile, Linnæus applied it to the parasitic flies. The genus is now much restricted from its Linnæan extent.

It's quite likely that I wouldn't be able to tell which is which: ferrets, weasels, mongooses, and ichneumons; if I found one in person.

Weasels are cuter. :)

(0:

We have both, but the ferrets were almost extirpated.

Baby weasels have an incredible amount of energy.

12:57 PM

Hello! I'm back.

Welcome back!

Anonymous

1:15 PM

@DamkerngT. I love ferrets! :-)

Anonymous

I used to be very good friends with one.

Anonymous

Have you ever seen a mink?

Anonymous

@Fantasier Welcome back! :-)

@snailboat Only wearable ones.

Anonymous

Oh . . .

1:18 PM

I guess minks may look similar to ferrets.

Anonymous

Mustelidae

The Mustelidae (from Latin mustela, weasel) are a family of carnivorous mammals, including the otters, badgers, weasel, martens, ferrets, minks and wolverines. Mustelids are diverse and the largest family in the order Carnivora. The internal classification is still disputed, with rival proposals containing between two and eight subfamilies. One study, published in 2008, questions the long-accepted Mustelinae subfamily, and suggests that Mustelidae consist of four major clades and three much smaller lineages. == VarietyEdit == Mustelids vary greatly in size and behaviour. The least weasel is not...

Oh, this reminds me of those meerkats on Discovery Channel.

@snailboat I honestly don't know. I obviously can't do it myself. However, I believe that we can look into EFL resources and see how grammar is used and perhaps construct a definition from those.

I feel that unless we are allowed to have tag-less questions, we're going to have problems with tags being useless anyway. Tags, defined as "specific, well-defined categories," are against the nature of the questioners who are responsible for tagging on this site.

Anonymous

I spent a lot of my time on ELL pretending the tag system didn't exist. :-)

Hey @Fantasier

Look, I'm pretty familiar with EFL resources; they don't use grammar in any meaningfully specific way, except when they use it to mean "the rules governing the use of a language"

1:34 PM

@jimsug I insist they do. I have studied with over 10 EFL coursebooks. There are specific topics they include in the grammar section in each unit. That is why I can tell what are about grammar and what aren't from your list.

> The asker mentions nouns, plurals, indefinite articles. Why are none of these tags on the question?

It's not that they're not about grammar.

It's that they don't have any meaningful and specific relationship to each other.

Anonymous

I like that we have both singular-vs-plural and grammatical-number.

Do they have to, though? When we talk about words' meaning, do they have specific relationship to each other?

That's a mistake.

@Fantasier It's not about the words. It's about the questions.

We're not categorising the words, we're categorising questions.

So those words may have nothing to do with each other.

1:37 PM

@jimsug Yeah, again, do the questions asking about meaning have any specific relationship to each other?

But those questions should ask about meaning.

Exactly. So those questions tagged with grammar should ask about grammar.

@Fantasier A vague tag isn't a good reason to keep another vague tag.

Perhaps there should just be a proofreading tag that draws in all questions asking whether things are "grammatical".

grammaticality

@Fantasier yes. They all ask about the meaning of words and phrases.

1:39 PM

sounds-ok

Well, if we start getting rid of every vague, every ambiguous tag, I think we'll eventually end up being either English Linguistics.SE or Advanced English Learners.SE

@Fantasier I reject your slippery slope argument.

@Fantasier Not going to happen.

Anonymous

People make up tags like sentence-checking now and then. We end up removing them.

@tchrist That could be a popular tag. :P

1:40 PM

@jimsug I don't know. Is it really slippery slope? :\ I feel we've been walking towards that since I saw tree diagrams in answers that don't need them.

Anonymous

We still have beta rep requirements for making new tags, so almost anyone can make one.

@Fantasier But you're arguing for a tag that we don't need. At least, that's how I see it.

If someone put a tree diagram in an answer, they felt that it contributed to the answer.

Anonymous

I think that some users like technical answers, and some users like writing technical answers. I think that's okay, too. People can write multiple answers.

Anonymous

Or I should say, multiple people can write answers to a single question.

Tags work on SO; they don't work here.

1:41 PM

They can work here, though.

Of course. Technical answers are better than no answer at all. But I think we are a learner's site...

Not in the same way.

Anonymous

One can write an answer filled with technobabble, and the other can write an answer trying to explain things as simply as they can.

Anonymous

And then people can read whatever they find useful.

We're a learners and experts site. All SE sites are.

1:42 PM

Here the people asking the question don't understand what they're asking about.

On SO, it's different.

We can't have ELL without English learners any more than we can have it without experts in the language.

@tchrist Certainly, I've said this. People don't know what they're tagging.

Moreover, the tags are in English, which is what they don't know.

@jimsug Yes, but I'm saying we do not want to make it just an expert's site.

And "grammar" is anything they get marked down for on tests.

If we can put grammar on everything, why put it on anything?

1:44 PM

This seem to be related to a question I asked a few hours ago: who are the tags for?

I'd see it burninated.

@jimsug We cannot put it on everything is what I'm saying.

Oh, but the askers can.

And do.

Just have a there-is-no-more-specific-tag-so-i-am-choosing-this tag and be done with it.

@Fantasier Why not? There is far more diversity in the grammar questions than there is in any other tag, even when corrected for quantity.

Anonymous

By the way, I think it's usually easier to get my point across using brackets than syntax trees.

1:45 PM

I mean, we can make them useful for experts, we can make them useful for beginners, or we can try something in the middle.

@tchrist The askers can put anything they want up, not specifically grammar.

The tag doesn't work as-is, but I think we can make it work.

@Fantasier Yeah but they default to grammar even when they could use something more specific.

Who would do all the retagging? Answerers?

@jimsug Not every one of them.

Wanna bet?

Nope. I don't have anything to bet lol

Anonymous

1:47 PM

@jimsug If we want every new question to have a specific, accurate set of tags, then yes, the site regulars will need to edit just about every question people post.

I'm already broke.

> I highly doubt that they will. Look at how many people have the explainer badge and the refiner badge - 222 and 8, respectively.

Explainer is edit the question and answer within 12 hours.

Refiner is 50x Explainer.

Just to save people looking them up.

Anonymous

I have Refiner and Copy Editor! :-)

My hopes aren't high that we it'll happen. I guess the real question is, do we really care about this?

I feel we can define grammar, because I can tell a grammar question apart from others, so there must be a possible definition.

1:49 PM

Grammar is morphology and syntax.

> ---- 1
I am really confused which one is correct. She is in/at the park, They are at/in the park, or I am in/at the park?
---- 2
* I only teach you.
* I teach only you.
* I teach you only.

I think that all the sentences have same meaning, but my teacher says that they are different from each other.

I think that the expressions are different but their meaning are same.

Can you help me understand the meaning of each sentence?
---- 3
Which of the following is a correct sentence:

1. Does anyone know where's Linda?

To me (and I believe a lot of other learners), grammar is not an empty word that applies to whatever that governs English.

@jimsug That's not a grammar question. (At least to me)

@jimsug word-choice prepositions

Wait for it....

Anonymous

@jimsug They're missing the fourth focus position, Only I teach you!

1:50 PM

@jimsug adverb-order

The Linda one is about grammar.

Anonymous

Wow, you keep making that message bigger!

Yeah, can't keep up or comment individually.

Okay.

Five questions, which of those are grammar questions?

Numbered so you can refer to them.

---- N

Anonymous

The Linda one is about grammar, sure. But what specifically? Subject auxiliary inversion and . . .

1:53 PM

1. in/at -- not grammar
2. grammar
3. grammar
4. grammar
5. grammar

Every one can be, but!

That's where I imagine it would be categorized under in a coursebook.

It won’t help locate similar questions nor draw experts in that domain.

Should we tag questions according to the subject of the question or according to the OP's viewpoint?

Anonymous

I don't know a good name for the pattern where you introduce a main clause with another main clause with a gap in complement position ("Does anyone know, where's Linda?"), as if one is embedded in the other. It occurs mainly in speech and tends to look funny in writing, and it looks particularly funny if there's no punctuation between the two.

1:55 PM

Only if there is a more specific tag can there be any hope of using that to locate similar questions or to draw experts in that area to it.

@tchrist What if the askers don't know the more specific tags?

@Fantasier They never do.

1 2 3 4 5

@tchrist Yeah, what should they do?

Anonymous

But the Linda question could at least be tagged with subject-auxiliary-inversion (or whatever we've named that tag).

1:56 PM

help-me-please

Anonymous

And possibly subordinate-clauses.

2 and 3 were not tagged grammar.

Until and unless site regulars agree to edit every incoming question, it will always suck.

@jimsug You can't use those as counterexamples (if you are). Not having a tag doesn't mean is cannot be tagged with that tag.

Anonymous

Apparently our tag is inversion. I suppose subject-auxiliary-inversion would be too long for a tag name :-(

1:58 PM

Because the askers are incompetent at English, which is why they are here.

Or that the tag not tagged is inappropriate, for that matter.

@Fantasier I am using it to demonstrate that just because you think something can be tagged with a tag, doesn't mean it should, nor that the current tags are inappropriate.

Do you think 2 and 3 would benefit from being tagged grammar?

I know no question that would benefit from the grammar tag.

Why don't we just let people tag things [English], if we're just leaving grammar as the trashcan tag for people who don't know what to tag things with?

@jimsug Because it's on the site-exclusion list. :)

2:00 PM

That can be changed.

Anonymous

We don't seem to have a adverb-order tag.

Still, the same question: what about those who know grammar is not a trashcan, but don't know what other tags to tag?

Hmm... "english" may not be an ideal tag for some ELL questions.

@snailboat Perhaps word-order then.

@DamkerngT. Why not? they're all in English.

They're all about English.

2:00 PM

That was me, by the way, at some point in my study.

Some old questions were written in another language.

@DamkerngT. Yeah, fair enough. But then, they should all be related to English in some way.

True, that. They were looking for a way to express those phrases in English.

Still, I think they wouldn't tag their questions with "english".

@Fantasier Do you really think that's the majority of [grammar] questions, though? Because of the almost 4400 questions, only 1700 of them have only the [grammar] tag.

I don't even think that "knowing that a question is related to grammar but not knowing a more specific term" would even constitute a significant minority.

@jimsug "Not so many people actually know when to tag grammar, so it's okay to trash the tag and leave those alone."

@jimsug I'm not saying it should. Many tags shouldn't be used. (Because there are more specific tags to use) . Tagging subjects and verb sure isn't as good as tagging subject-verb-agreement.

2:05 PM

@Fantasier Don't misquote me like that. It's rude and disrespectful.

@jimsug Sorry. What are you saying, then? Because that's how I interpreted your message.

Right. Well that's not what I said.

Could you elaborate a little more? I truly want to understand you.

Do you honestly believe that "knowing that a question is about grammar but not knowing anything more specific" actually represents a significant minority?

Yes. But even if it doesn't, is it a reason to ignore them?

2:09 PM

I think we need a tagging manual here on ELL.

Anonymous

I want to tag a question with proper-names, but it's a synonym of proper-nouns, and the question isn't exactly about proper nouns.

@fantasier What do you believe the purpose of tags are?

Anonymous

Should I add the tag anyway?

This is likely a source of our contention.

@jimsug To categorize questions.

2:10 PM

@snailboat I've had that come up before.

@Fantasier Is it acceptable no matter how loosely they categorise them, no matter how tenuous and insignificant the relation?

For me, tags are supposed to be relevant to the questions, like keywords on a library cards.

Which is why I'm not really object to the grammar tag, given that we have other more specific tags tagging along with our questions.

@jimsug Hmmm, no. If it's really insignificant, that is.

But that's just my opinion. I prefer something more consensus-like.

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. We don't seem to have anything like a consensus at the moment.

2:13 PM

nods

*a library cards

@Fantasier Okay, so this is my main objection to the grammar tag. It is an extremely broad topic. It has so many sub-topics that there can, and are, multiple questions that have no substantial relation to each other except that they happen to be tagged "grammar". You say that it is good that there is a broad topic. I disagree. Having such a broad topic actively harms the ability of users to find a question that has been asked before.

We end up with hundreds of snowclones because people can't find a question they want the answer to, and then ask a new question that is not effectively different.

@jimsug They can find it through other more specific tags, because in case that they know such tags, they do, as in some of your example questions.

Not for the 1700 questions that are tagged solely with grammar.

If you feel that grammar here does not have any significant relationships inside, then why don't we redefine it to make that happen, instead of getting rid of it? To me, it could be defined in a way that is just as broad as meaning.

We can't.

Because meaning is a sub-topic of grammar.;

2:17 PM

A-ha. That is another point where we disagree, I guess.

Grammar supervenes on meaning.

Perhaps. Again, it depends on our definitions of grammar.

Sure.

But I find it difficult to find and agree with a definition of grammar that does not include meaning.

That is why we should work out the new definition. But if you're saying that's really impossible, that's totally fine. Burnination is a choice.

Btw, when I try to look for duplicate old questions, I've never used tags; I wonder if it's because our tags are ineffective, or it's just because it's impractical to find questions via tags.

2:18 PM

Tags are probably more important here than on SO

Anonymous

I treat semantics and grammar as separate, even though they're obviously not actually entirely independent of one another.

@jimsug And work less well.

Because on SO, you copy and paste an error message and get the answer.

Need help.

You can't really do that here.

2:20 PM

My last dupe Q suggestion: ell.stackexchange.com/q/4587/3281

"The teacher marked my answer wrong. Why?"

I found it via "whichth".

Anonymous

Oh. We have 4367 questions tagged grammar? Um.

@jimsug In cases where the questioners just tag grammar as an empty tag (because they have to tag), chances are they will use another tag to do that job instead once we get rid of grammar. grammar is simply victimized here because learners have seen it so much.

(Which is also a good thing, as I've said in my answer)

@snailboat Ah, fewer than I expected!

(I expected about 1/3)

2:21 PM

It's more like 1/4, I think.

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. thousand-yard stare

nods

@Fantasier I don't think this is precisely the problem.

@jimsug What else is the problem?

There are a lot of [grammar] questions with other tags. So most people using [grammar] use more specific tags, too.

Anonymous

2:23 PM

By the way, this got re-opened: ell.stackexchange.com/q/70341/230

Just a thought experiment, if we had a Pets stack, would it be okay if we have about 1/3 of the Q tagged with "cat", and another 1/3 tagged with "dog"?

@jimsug Then the questions will be found using those other specific tags?

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. We do.

@Fantasier What I mean is - why are those questions tagged [grammar]?

@snailboat Ah, we do!?

2:25 PM

@jimsug Because the askers believe they are about grammar?

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. It gave me an excuse to post pictures of my snails! i.stack.imgur.com/6M6Xs.jpg

LOL

@Fantasier Right. Look, I don't think we're going to convince each other. Personally, I don't much care for retagging every question that comes in, so if that's what happens, I'm sorry - I'm not prepared to do that.

Anonymous

Pets.SE has a structure kind of like Stack Overflow, where there's a natural set of categories. The dogs tag on Pets.SE is like the haskell tag on Stack Overflow. Well, except that dogs are more popular than Haskell.

@Fantasier It's getting late, and I admire your desire to keep the bar as low as possible for learners. It's a good attitude to have.

Anonymous

2:27 PM

ELL doesn't have that sort of natural set of categories.

@jimsug Okay. I guess we just have to agree to disagree. Sorry again for quoting you like that. I do respect you.

But I have things to do in the morning, so should get a few hours sleep. Night all.

Anonymous

Rest well, @jimsug!

Good night!

Have a good sleep!

2:29 PM

@snailboat Damn it all to hell.

You guys have to delete those when they're closed.

In favor of reopening: This question is nearly impossible for a non-native to answer with a dictionary. It relates to subtle knowledge about the difference between "type" and "class" that most native speakers only hold subconsciously. Many dictionaries misleadingly define a type as a "group" or "category", saying nothing about why it's weird to speak of "a member of a type" but natural to speak of "a member of a class". — Ben Kovitz 12 hours ago

I wish it had been asked by a non-native speaker.

Rather than by a troll getting his rocks off?

I wish it hadn't been that.

Anonymous

I don't know how to tag this question: ell.stackexchange.com/q/70105/230

Anonymous

The examples contain subordinate interrogative clauses.

Anonymous

2:37 PM

I could tag it interrogative and subordinate-clauses, but that although bit at the end has me somewhat confused.

if-vs-whether

Anonymous

I guess I can make that :-)

If I had been learning English grammar only recently, yes-- tchrist's suggestion!

or whether, if, although.

Anonymous

If no one gave me any suggestions, I would have gone with interrogative subordinate-clauses extraposition since those are the grammatical bits in the question, but I'm not sure any of those would have been helpful.

Anonymous

Wow! We have a question tagged grammar titled "Relative clauses"

2:42 PM

@snailboat You're right. OP understands the if/whether stuff; what is asked is how those extraposed clauses differ from the last example, which is (as the answer points out) not an extraposition at all.

Anonymous

Oh, I still don't know how to tag it! :-)

Anonymous

I decided to try to re-tag some grammar questions, but it's hard sometimes.

I think coming up with a tag set is similar to organizing chapters/sections/entries in a grammar book.

dummy-pronouns

There are very many ways to do it.

Anonymous

2:46 PM

But when you're writing a book, you have control over what information you include and how you synthesize it, and you can assemble it into a coherent whole.

(Virtually, we can retag all grammar questions with PEU entry numbers. :P)

Anonymous

On the other hand, ELL by its very nature is not coherent. People ask questions because they're confused, not because they know everything about the language and all happen to agree on a single theoretical framework to organize their knowledge into.

@snailboat But we seem to accept the idea that it's our job, not the OPs'.

Isn't the question "Who uses the tags?" Should we not be designing tags to suit the uses to which they will be put?

Anonymous

Okay, so who uses the tags?

2:49 PM

I'm not raising my hand.

Anonymous

There's the SEO thingy. It sticks tags into question titles when you're not logged in, which can (in theory) help with Google search ranking.

I wish I could.

Anonymous

I have no idea if it actually does. I honestly don't know much about how SEO works anymore.

Anonymous

(I usually try my best not to care.)

Anonymous

But that has a downside, too.

2:50 PM

@snailboat That sounds like we should tag our Q for SEO!

Anonymous

If we have tags that are confusing on our questions, and it sticks those in the question titles, then people coming in from Google will get confused.

I think the problem is probably the ones who use the tags are not the ones who initially tag. Answerers tend (?) to use the tags more than Questioner? But the ones who tag are Questioners.

Anonymous

At one point, a high-rep user on Japanese.SE started tagging typo questions source-error because he couldn't get them closed, and he wanted a way to mark them as being based on errors.

Anonymous

He left the site years ago, but the tag stuck around. One time I searched for something and found a search result that began "Source error - What is the difference between . . . "

Anonymous

I was confused!

2:52 PM

@snailboat Oh, he shared the same idea I use for my private tags!

Anonymous

I got that tag burninated.

@snailboat Ah, right! SE puts the first tag in front of the Q!

Anonymous

After we went and closed all the old typo questions :-)

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. It puts a tag in front of the question title. I'm not sure how it picks which one. It's not always the one on the left.

Is it the first-- ahh

Anonymous

2:54 PM

Anyway, the lesson of that story is, you want at least one good tag on each question, but zero bad tags, if possible.

4

I never thought tags are much use; but inspired by MAR I sat down last night and started retagging every question I have answered which has the grammar tag. I replaced grammar with whatever tag I could think of that would tell me what I perceived as the core issue(s) raised. That way I'll be able to find previous answers more easily and point to duplicates.

@snailboat I find it an argument for grammar.

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. Yeah, I think seeing "grammar" stuck before a question title is unlikely to be confusing.

Looking at our questions from the outside world, grammar -- Can I use ...? makes a lot of sense.

Anonymous

I wonder if I can convince people that countable tags should be plural, and that tags should probably not be adjectives.

Anonymous

2:58 PM

I think they ideally take the form of generic noun phrases.

What are some of the tags that are adjective?

@snailboat I'll buy that.

@Fantasier interrogative

Anonymous

And so the plural form is natural, and instead of archaic you have archaisms or (my preference) archaic-language.

Yes

@StoneyB Ahh, I see. I've seen -ive as nouns so much that I didn't think about that.

3:00 PM

Ah, our tags also appear in Google one-boxes! (i.stack.imgur.com/9bJZ7.jpg)

Huhhh

Why does only the tag "american english" appear in the results?

A: First tag in the title of the page is not that convenient

Wow

Anonymous

I'm under the impression it ranks each tag by some criteria (I don't know what criteria) and then takes the top-scoring tag, prepending it to the title.

Anonymous

But if none of the tags score high enough, it doesn't add any of them?

Anonymous

3:05 PM

I don't really know.

Anonymous

I noticed the same thing earlier. It refused to add the literature tag to the title of any question on ELL, as far as I could see.

Anonymous

This answer on Meta.SE says "the most common tag": meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19190/…

Anonymous

Although that would seem to predict behavior I don't actually observe.

Anonymous

So I think the answer is wrong. Finding documentation on Meta.SE is hard, though.

Anonymous

11

Sorry, this is absolutely necessary, otherwise we get demolished by scrapers using our own content in Google ranking. For background you can read: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1985264 And: http://twitter.com/#!/codinghorror/status/12721357573857280 http://twitter.com/#!/codinghorror/st...

Anonymous

3:11 PM

7

A: Scrapers enter the scene - was the choice of license right?

As for the first issue, "first tag in page title" isn't uncomfortable, it's more relevant than you think. For example, if my question is why can't I get the listbox to work with strings? that has a different (and certainly more useful) set of meanings as C# - why can't I get the listb...

A: How is the page title tag determined

I think sometimes I see results on ELL clones come before results on ELL.

Anonymous

8

Usually the tag included in the title is picked exactly like you expect - it's the top tag on the question. However, we try not to duplicate information more than absolutely necessary, so we don't bother prepending the tag name when it's already used in the title elsewhere. In this case, the wor...

Anonymous

But that doesn't explain why literature doesn't show up in the title when I search for "Is learning English with the Bible a good idea for ESL people".

Anonymous

(Which, by the way, has two close votes.)

Anonymous

I'll just go on assuming what it actually does is undocumented.

3:21 PM

However: searching on "ESL English Bible" doesn't return this Q on the first page - but searching on "ESL English Bible literature" brings it up first!

Interesting!

3:55 PM

"Aptamer-conjugated AuNPs has also become a powerful tool for point-of-care diagnostics." - I wonder why is it not have

@CopperKettle It may in part be because the authors appear to be speakers of Indian English; but I imagine it's mostly because they think of AuNps, divorced from its root in the noun particles, as a substance rather than a plurality of individuals.