The Importance of Not Being Esoteric

So anyway, I was told by someone-who-shall-not-be-named (Hi Dad!!! wave-wave-wave) that my tags for this blog were....ahem...esoteric.

I cannot tell a lie, I had to look it up.

According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, it means:
1a: designed for or understood by the specially initiated alone
b: requiring or exhibiting knowledge that is restricted to a small group: difficult to understand
2a: limited to a small circle
3: of special, rare or unusual interest

huh. Someone-who-shall-not-be-named is calling me difficult to understand? Somewhere around here there's a metal container for heating food making comments about the coloring of a container that heats water shaped in such a way as to make a high-pitched noise once the water is boiling. Yeah that's right, I went there! :-)

Now, normally I would think it's cool to be part of a small exclusive group, but I guess if it's a blog on genealogy, it would probably help to provide metadata that is understandable by most, if not all.

Oh yeah, I tend to use the term metadata because that's what I say at work. We used to use "keywords" in the old days, but now we are too cool for that because we are so way more technical than we used to be and now we use "metadata". Except that the next standard we'll be using for submitting data to FDA uses "keyword" again. So much for moving forward. But I won't think about that until tomorrow, or maybe next year.

By the way, is it "metadata" or is it "meta data"? I've seen it written both ways by people who are infinitely more technical than me. With the english language, we tend to create new words by smooshing together two old words. For a while we might put a dash in between, but then we'll lose the dash and have a whole new word. Remember when we wrote "E-mail"? That's too many letters of course. Now we write "email". I figured we were way past writing "meta data", but maybe I'm ahead of myself.

I've also noticed also that other places in the wide world of the internet also use the phrases "labels" and "tags" for keywords and metadata. Can we pick just one please? I'm going to vote for "tags" because it's only one syllable and really short so I don't have to spend so much time typing. I know, I know, you're wondering, 'how can she care about keeping words short and not typing when she just goes on and on about nothing?' I guess it's all part of my esotericness!

So I will go in and make adjustments to my tags for my blog so that others can more easily find what they might possibly be looking for, because after all, I really do want things to be easily found. Otherwise, I won't be helping others who might be interested in the same thing topics I am!