Most of the comments ignored the last half of the last sentence:

“The Great Mormon Novel is a dream held by literary types in the church.

“It is also the Great White Whale pursued by devout Mormons who can’t understand — in this day and age — just how uncomfortable, exposed and betrayed an authentic literary masterpiece would make them feel.”

Johnston’s comment is about as terse a restatement as I know of the reasons Lionel Trilling hesitated to accede to his students’ request to teach a class in Modern Lit (see “On the Teaching of Modern Literature,” in _Beyond Culture_). Modern literature is very personal, demands a very personal response, Trilling says. And I was still surprised at how personal the story is.

And while I won’t say the story is “an authentic literary masterpiece” (despite being part of a master’s thesis), the story did make at least one reader uncomfortable, perhaps feeling somewhat “exposed and betrayed.” The author intended “And” as a love letter to his wife. He was trying to catch a particularly difficult moment, reassuring her that things would get better, but I don’t think she saw it that way.

Hmm, I think it’s just a holdover from earlier versions when there were only categories. Then “cloud” computing came into vogue and they added tags.

That makes sense.

WP’s idiosyncratic combination of the two systems still strikes me as odd.

Hmm, I think it’s just a holdover from earlier versions when there were only categories. Then “cloud” computing came into vogue and they added tags.

However, you don’t HAVE to use tags at all, and for all practical purposes, you don’t HAVE to use categories, either. All posts are automatically slotted into “uncategorized” category but are not given a default tag.

I understand that you’re using them for general terms and more specific terms, and I can see why that would have advantages, but WP’s idiosyncratic combination of the two systems still strikes me as odd.

Categories = subdivision name, like “Green Acres.”

Tags = street names within the subdivision, e.g., “Eddie Albert Lane” and “Eva Gabor Circle.”

And do you come up with the categories yourself or are they somehow predefined by WordPress?

You come up with them yourself. For instance, I have categories and tags, but my categories are tightly contained.

At first, I only used the four main points of my blog (”religion,” “money,” “politics,” “sex”) as my categories, but then I realized I talk about more than that, so now it’s those four plus “books,” “Kansas City,” and “miscellaneous.”

I use tags to subdivide the above seven categories to within a millimeter of their lives.

And do you come up with the categories yourself or are they somehow predefined by WordPress?

There are actually two key differences:

1. Categories can have parent and child relationships (e.g. can be expressed hierarchically) and are are selected via checkbox.

2. Tags can be entered just by typing terms and separating by commas.

Becaise of these two differences, tags are generally used to express the specific semantic or keyword data of a post whereas categories are more, well, categorical. In addition, most blog platforms (or content management systems) display tags and categories differently (for example, you may have seen Tag clouds on some websites).

I hate using both, but because we started off with categories I don’t want to discontinue support for them. However, I like using tags because they are especially handy for linking themed posts like Short Story Friday.