See the description for connotaciones:
DO NOT USE -- This tag should be avoided.
What’s going on here? Should this tag be burninated, or should it be kept and given a better description?
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Well the warning was added like 7 years ago, back in 2012, see its excerpt history.– fedorquiSep 23, 2019 at 20:21
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2Having said that, I do think uso-de-palabras probably covers it and works better, since connotaciones can have a very important part of subjectivity that we want to avoid. In case a connotation depends on circumstances, other tags can help in showing this, like diferencias-regionales or español-medieval, etc.– fedorquiSep 23, 2019 at 20:23
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1@fedorqui there are only 10 questions with the connotaciones tag, maybe we can safely merge that tag with the uso-de-palabras one. In fact some of them use both.– CharlieSep 24, 2019 at 6:34
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@fedorqui - The excerpt history link is not working for me. I don't see any discussion of the need to add a warning.– aparente001Sep 24, 2019 at 6:50
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@Charlie yes, it sounds like a plan. Let's see if others have other views, just in case, and then we can proceed (say in a week or so).– fedorquiSep 24, 2019 at 6:52
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@Charlie and others -- I can imagine questions that really do need the connotaciones tag. For example a recent question elicited provocador and incitador as answers. In my opinion these two terms have strong connotations related to disingenuous, covert actions resulting in violence, destruction and chaos. But maybe others don't take them that way. It could be an interesting question. (That's just an example.)– aparente001Sep 24, 2019 at 6:53
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@aparente001 nice point, but I still see the "connotations" tag as a subgroup of the "uso-de-palabras" one. What you are asking is "how do I use these words to avoid connotations" or maybe "can I use these words literally and avoid bad connotations". Another tag we could use in replace could be "significado", maybe. Still, I can be wrong and maybe there is room in this site for the "connotaciones" tag. I agree with fedorqui, let's give it a week and see what people think.– CharlieSep 24, 2019 at 7:03
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@aparente001 ah no, there was no discussion, my link just shows the first (and only) revision of the excerpt page. I assume Flimzy somehow decided this, but there are no traces of discussion about it here in Meta (I could not find any, at least).– fedorquiSep 24, 2019 at 7:19
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@Charlie in fact I just discovered we already talked about this tag in my question ¡Ordenemos las etiquetas!, that got your answer where you say connotaciones podría fusionarse con uso-de-palabras. So we keep agreeing in that uso-de-palabras covers it properly.– fedorquiSep 24, 2019 at 7:21
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@Charlie - Well, that was just one example. Here's another situation where it could be helpful: Here are the dictionary definitions of Word A and Word B. Does one of them have more of a such-and-so connotation than the other? // It would be helpful to know what was bothering Flimzy about connotations....– aparente001Sep 25, 2019 at 4:49
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2 Answers
Some of the posts found in a Meta search for connotations hint about Flimzy thinking that questions with that tag should be probably tagged with selección-de-palabras instead:
EL&U has a connotation tag which is different from ours. And they decided that nuance is a bad tag, and their reasoning seemed to apply to every one of our 9 nuance questions; so I removed the nuance tag from our questions. I also removed the conntations from questions that were really word-choice (selecion-de-palabras) questions. – Flimzy Jun 14 '12 at 4:32
Two weeks later he asked for the tag to be removed from questions:
I encourage anyone with the ability to edit any questions with the following tags to remove these tags [...]
connotations - Some of these may be better as selección-de-palabras or word-usage.
asked Jun 30 '12 at 2:54 – Flimzy
And barely a minute after that, the DO NOT USE notice was added to the tag's wiki:
DO NOT USE -- This tag should be avoided.
created Jun 30 '12 at 2:55 – Flimzy
Sadly*, it seems like nobody was up to the task of removing those tags, and the Meta post asking the community to do it was eventually forgotten. Hence why we still have questions from 2012 using the tag.
*If I may give my personal take on this...
We've had a number of questions along the lines of "Is [word] offensive?", "Does [word] have a bad tone?", etc. where the answers all ranged from "yes" to "no" to "depends on context". Questions like these tend to attract subjective, opinion-based answers and heated comments. Also, since answers are subjective, there's no way to select a "correct" answer, so the accepted answer is usually just the one that matches OP's point of view.
Because of this, I think questions about "connotations" are not a good fit for the site. Alas, as a "site for asking questions about Spanish" there's little we can do to prevent such questions from being asked (short of outright declaring them off-topic); but I think using the tags to shift the focus of these questions from "What connotations does this word have?" to "How is this word used?" might help with that.
So, back to your question. Should connotaciones be burninated, or should it be kept and given a better description?
I'd say it should be either removed, as was already intended years ago; or merged with uso-de-palabras.
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Agreed. We can create the synonym connotaciones → uso-de-palabras so that it is not created again. Also, we can check all the questions (10 right now) and see if they need some retagging or closing. Let's wait until next week just in case someone gives extra feedback.– fedorquiSep 26, 2019 at 14:48
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Here are some examples of questions where the focus is on connotations:
Uso irónico de "lo tienes/llevas claro"
https://english.stackexchange.com/q/496987/112436
Connotation means (this was a quick google search, thus the definition comes from Lexico) "an idea or feeling that a word invokes in addition to its literal or primary meaning."
"Connotation" comes to mind when I think of that question about translating entitlement. It is so difficult to find one word that works for both the positive connotation (I want these battered women to believe that they are entitled to live in safety) and the negative (These young rich kids believe they are entitled to get an A in every single class, with no effort).
I get that it's a bit tricky to know when not to use this tag, but I think we are up to the challenge!
