7

So we have a question asking about "ellipses." Which is the plural of ellipsis. Except it's not.

The post itself is kind of a non-sequitur, because the poster used the tag and the plural that goes along with it, but appears to have meant Ellipsis the grammatical construct. OP has since removed the tag.

But then...why do we have this tag? I double checked. It has Usage guidance:

Just three little dots...

The longer description is:

An ellipsis is three dots or periods (...) used to indicate a pause, a speaker trailing off, or quoted material which has been cut out. When using an ellipsis at the end of a sentence, write it as four dots. Word processing software may replace three individual dots with a single ellipsis character.

Is there a story behind this? It was created in 2015 and has 6 questions (3 of which also tag ).

Should we make it a synonym of which has 103 questions? As far as I can tell, there are no other tags for specific punctuation marks (aside from quotes but that's about more than the actual quote marks).

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
6

That is oddly specific. I don't think we need the tag at all -- neither as a tag nor as a synonym. It's been used on six questions since being created in 2015, all of which would be fine with just . Unless I hear objections, I'll merge it into that tag (which has the advantage of not bumping the questions with tag edits).

Update: merged.

5
  • 1
    Yes. With only 3 questions that don't already use the punctuation tag, it's easy to retag even if that's the way to go. If you, as a mod, have a better method, I'm all for it. Why don't you ask @LaurenIpsum if you can? That is the user who created the tag.
    – Cyn
    Commented Feb 17, 2019 at 1:28
  • Sounds good to me.
    – user Mod
    Commented Feb 17, 2019 at 12:28
  • 3
    @Cyn I don't think we'd necessarily need to ask the user who created the tag in the first place, regardless of who did it. (Note that finding out who first used the tag isn't as simple as just looking at the questions that have it now, as it could have been removed from posts where it was used earlier.) Sometimes, a tag is created because someone genuinely thinks that it will be useful, and the tag then turns out to not be as useful as envisioned. In such a case, simply removing the tag should be fine.
    – user Mod
    Commented Feb 17, 2019 at 12:31
  • Merging sounds like the right thing to do.
    – Galastel supports GoFundMonica
    Commented Feb 17, 2019 at 16:04
  • 1
    @aCVn I know who it was because it's in the tag history. And I suggested asking the user because the user is very active here and an oldtimer and I thought it would be worth doing as a courtesy before just making her/his tag go poof (not asking for permission). I wouldn't ask that if it were created by a new user who didn't realize they shouldn't.
    – Cyn
    Commented Feb 17, 2019 at 16:52

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .