Play tag

Children love to play tag during the school breaks. One child is the chaser — and the others have to run away. If the chaser touches another player, that child becomes the chaser — and the original chaser now joins the others who are running away. It’s a simple, international game of fun.

In a way, politicians are playing tag at the moment. Instead of a harmless game of fun, theirs is a game of financial risk. Search for "tag" using Google and you’ll find it collocates very nicely with “price”. In shops, the price tag is what you look at to find out how much something costs. But look more closely at the stories in Google, and you will see that the stories are rarely about shops. In fact, many of them are about the price tag of projects, investments, terrorism and financial bailouts.

I have a picture in my mind of politicians playing tag with each other. There's British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the chaser who thinks his country is paying the most — until he touches US President George W Bush, who then has to increase the price tag of his country’s bailouts to save failing banks, insurance firms and car companies — until he can touch another politician, who then has to start paying more.

In the children’s game of tag, the teacher blows the whistle to end the game. Is it time for someone to blow the whistle on the politicians? Probably not.

I also like the word tag because it has so many meanings, despite its short length. If you look to the right of this blog you’ll find a small box with the heading “Tags”. These have nothing to do with price tags, but in a way you can play a game with them. Click on any one of the tags and we will take you to an article, exercise or blog that has also been tagged with the same word or expression. We tag all our content, which means we assign keywords that describe what the content is about. A "tag cloud" is a set of tags that are related, but individually link to other content. It’s basically a way to chase articles around our site.

If you find something that interests you, stop playing around. Read it. Sometimes, you may find only one article has been tagged with that particular word or expression. In the future, there’ll be more!

Of course, we’re not the only site tagging content. If you like searching sites using tags, you’ll probably enjoy playing tag with Newstaggr . This new search engine allows you to browse news via tags. It gathers stories, quotes and images from news sites such as Reuters, CNN, The New York Times, and the BBC, and then tags them. If you search for a keyword, your search results include a list of stories that contain that word — and a tag cloud from tags created from that story and other stories where the same tag appears. As the tags are usually just one to three words, they are also good for learners of English. You can focus on just the tags, and see how many you know. Look up the words in an online dictionary if you don’t know them. It’s a simple, international game of fun!

Wise Words: tag

"House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has embraced an auto bailout, though she hasn't set a price tag." Associated Press

"It now appears likely that the government ... will fund some kind of bailout for the auto industry. The price tag could be in the $25 - $50 billion range..." Gather.com