"Where are the great tags that if clicked on would produce a store of raw material that would enable me to write a book?"

I say, when asked "And how does Mrs Secord qualify as 'women in the military'?"

Women in the military is a long-standing tag on this blog, and, I say, "I didn't want to create a new tag. It's just broad interpretation of existing tags to avoid creating new tags."

There are various theories of tagging. When I first started doing tags on this blog, I tried to keep them as general as possible. I had a politics tag! Sometimes, I leaned — overleaned — toward specificity, making a new tag every time I named a person — or a plant or animal or city or food or body part or item of clothing —  but tag proliferation seems mostly wrong.

I say mostly, because I regret all the names of human individuals that end up only appearing once. I'll call that the Ashley Dupre problem. But I do not regret having a parrot tag. And I do not regret having breasts and nipples. I do regret not having a tag for commenter thinks he's making the joke that I already made.

My personal history of tagging — generally, then specifically — explains why there's only one tag for George W. Bush — Bush — and over 70 tags for Barack Obama. There are 10 tags that are in the form "Obama is like X" (not counting the "Obama is not like X" tag). Example: Obama is like Bush (which is on 61 posts!) There are 7 tags in the "Obama the X" form. Example: Obama the boyfriend (which is on 47 posts!).

Ultimately, I arrived at the idea that the best tags are the ones that pull up a set of posts, going back over a nice stretch of time, that I could imagine mining for material to write a book. Women in the military has some potential to be a tag like that.

What are the best tags, in my view, using that standard? Maybe that's a trade secret. If I told you, you could do your research in my archive, but — to give some obvious examples — here are some: racial politics, gender politics, gender difference, lightweight religion, religion substitutes, single-earner household, etiquette, apologies, suicide, prostitution. To suggest some of the weird potential: There are 30 posts with the tag bathtub, 94 with excrement, 67 with snakes, 40 with phallic symbol.

Then there are the tags that might have been. Only 1 post has female appetite diseases. That should have gone on many posts, but I forgot I started it. Only 1 has personal innovation lifestyle. What even is that? Some trend that never trended?

Of all the missed opportunities, as I complete this post, I see I don't have a tag for tags. I'll have to go with the old school tag blogging, which dates back to my days of over-generalization and resistance to specificity. I need a tag for I'm resistant or something. Ah, the stubbornness tag. And the ultimate perfect tag — previously used 3 times — I'm not making a tag for this.