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and are both tags on ELU. What's the purpose of the summary-less tag?

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  • I’m marking this completed because these were made synonyms quite some time ago now.
    – tchrist Mod
    Sep 11, 2016 at 16:47

2 Answers 2

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Questions when to use hyphens are still questions about hyphens, and I don't see any need to distinguish between questions about hyphens, and questions about using them.

I expect that most of the questions about hyphens (if not all the questions) are about its usage; I find difficult somebody asks "Is this an hyphen?" or "When was an hyphen first used?"

-2

Here’s how I see it:

  • The tag should be used for questions regarding the punctuation mark.

  • The tag should be used for questions regarding where and whether something should be hyphenated.

These are actually different, different just as:

Well, it could be worse: people could have asked to merge with . 😱

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  • 1
    They may be quite different to you, but I don't see much evidence that the questions are being tagged according to these distinctions. Nor do I see the point of going to that level, frankly. Nov 15, 2012 at 4:44
  • @FumbleFingers apostrophe is different from possessive, just as question-mark is different from questions, period from sentences, and exclamation-point from exclamations. See how different the punctuation is from the things where you use it?
    – tchrist Mod
    Nov 15, 2012 at 4:54
  • 6
    I see they are different - but as I said, I don't see that difference as being something worth tracking with tags. In short, I see how different they are as "not enough". More to the point, the people actually using the tags aren't taking much notice of the distinction, so unless that changes it won't make much difference. Nov 15, 2012 at 4:58
  • Presumably the difference should be made clear in the tags' wiki summaries. For hyphenation at least, that's not the case.
    – Andrew Leach Mod
    Nov 15, 2012 at 12:10
  • Are all hyphen and dash questions to be tagged under hyphenation? Do we have a dash tag, an en-dash tag, and an em-dash tag? Nov 15, 2012 at 12:32
  • 1
    All those categories seem redundant to me. If I was presented with a choice of tagging "hyphen" or "hyphenation" I would probably just randomly pick one, and what's the point of that.
    – Lynn
    Nov 16, 2012 at 14:45
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    "Question mark" is different from "questions" in that not all questions require a question mark (consider rhetorical questions and indirect questions) and not all question marks are attached to questions (e.g., sometimes you'll see (?) in the middle of a sentence). Similarly for most of your other examples. (Which isn't to say that they all really need separate tags, but at least it's conceivable that a question could merit one tag and not the other.) But hyphenation and hyphens are genuinely coextensive: you can't hyphenate without a hyphen, and you can't use a hyphen without hyphenating.
    – ruakh
    Nov 18, 2012 at 2:56

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