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

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2 Answers

up vote 3 down vote

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?"

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up vote -2 down vote

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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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. – FumbleFingers Nov 15 '12 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 Nov 15 '12 at 4:54
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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. – FumbleFingers Nov 15 '12 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 Nov 15 '12 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? – coleopterist Nov 15 '12 at 12:32
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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 '12 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 '12 at 2:56

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