The new "selected tags" widget.

Check it out in the sidebar.

I was asked the other day by Another Unknown:

I’d like to see a post about your post tags. And then, that post would naturally require you to use all of your tags. That would be fun and interesting. Separately, is there a way to see all the Althouse tags? I know we can click on a tag used in a particular post and see all of the other related postings, but is there a way to see the full list of tags?

There are 6,444 tags on this blog. Back in 2013, here, I did a post listing all the tags when the total was under 4,000. I'm not going to list all the 6,444 tags now, and I'm surely not going to put them in the sidebar. It would make the page absurdly long and presumably slow loading. But I was able to see how to do a sidebar widget with selected tags. It was a big job eyeballing all 6,444 tags while thinking about how to choose what to make visible in the sidebar.

Writing that last sentence made the tag "seen and unseen" appropriate for this post, and that's an example — perhaps the prime example — of the kind of tag I selected for display in the sidebar. I picked mostly abstractions, especially ones that pull together miscellaneous things. I excluded the biggest category of tags: Names of people. I also excluded tags for animals — bats, bears, bees, etc. — objects — furniture, sandwiches — and places — Lake Mendota, Yellowstone. I excluded many big categories — books, movies, TV, religion, law — because they were big but specific in ways that made them not seem to be doors that anyone would be intrigued to open.

I wanted a list of tags that I'd enjoy poking into. The tags are in order by frequency, with the last thing on the list — the least-used of the selected — being "unwritten books." Perhaps — with all my new time — I am writing a book or many books using what I've collected over the past 13 years under those tags.

What got me onto this tag-widget project — in addition to the nudging by Another Unknown — is something I wrote at the end of the first post of today:

The only way it's "hyperbolic" to call it stealing is if you expect us to modify language to coddle and insulate politicians. It's not hyperbole to defeat that expectation. It's clear speech — my #1 cause on this blog.

"Clear speech" is the tag that underlies my most important unwritten book.