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I notice that EL&U currently has a tag labeled 'antedecent', and that seven of the fifteen questions that carry this tag include the word antedecent in their headline. for example, Antecedent of "velocity u" in "particles moving in a medium with macroscopic velocity u". Is this a typo for antecedent, or is some notion of language and usage "before decency" at play here?

I actually tried to go into the tag Wiki to change the spelling of the tag to 'antecedent', but found that I didn't have access to it. Any thoughts on how I (or others) should proceed? (I note that there is also an 'antecedents' tag that has twelve associated questions. Maybe the simplest thing would be for me to go in and replace all of the 'antedecent' tags with 'antecedents' tags, and then correct any related typos. But we would still want to delete the 'antedecent' tag itself, wouldn't we?)

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    Antedecent companions are far more entertaining. The recovering alcholics, reformed womanizers, born-again Christians, and other postdecents can be a bit of a wet blanket. – choster Mar 25 '15 at 19:22
  • We have a few anti-decent people around here, but I'm not so sure about antedecent. – phenry Mar 25 '15 at 19:38
  • I don't see why someone downvoted this. I've upvoted partly in recognition of OP's selfless public-spiritedness, and partly in hopes it may give the issue a higher profile while the duff tag persists. If it gets mistakenly used again, it'll presumably hang around indefinitely unless someone spots it and retags. (Perhaps inspired to do so after reading this very comment! :) – FumbleFingers Mar 26 '15 at 0:56
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    This should now be guaranteed not to return, because I’ve just made it a synonym for antecedents. – tchrist Sep 11 '16 at 15:53
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I would just go ahead and switch all the singulars to plurals. There aren't that many of them.

Eventually it may delete itself once it no longer has any questions that love it anymore. :)

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  • Okay, tchrist—thanks for the advice. I'm going to go ahead with changing the 15 instances of the oddball tag now. – Sven Yargs Mar 25 '15 at 3:54
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    ...all of the 'antedecent' tags are now changed to 'antecedents'—and the typos in some of the heads are corrected, too. The 'antedecent' tag remains available as an option for users to select (though with no associated questions at this point), so mods or whoever else has access to the tags list might want to delete it altogether. – Sven Yargs Mar 25 '15 at 4:24
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    @SvenYargs I believe we would have to request assistance of a kindly Community Manager if we wished to have the tag blacklisted so that it could not be created or used again. – tchrist Mar 25 '15 at 14:07
  • @tchrist — As you yourself recently suggested in a footnote here, the ready availability of a 'kindly Community Manager' is by no means guaranteed... Is there some kind of spell or other form of invocation that must first be resorted to? :) – Erik Kowal Mar 26 '15 at 2:01

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