How to find old AskMeFi answers?

January 29, 2009 4:52 AM

How to find old AskMeFi answers?

Recently I read a question on AskMeFi where the person was looking for a word that means internally self-consistent, i.e. to behave in a way in all aspects of one's life that was consistent with all other parts of one's life.

I can't find it, and rather than reading back through every page, I wondered if there was a quicker way.

Essentially I want to find all questions from _this_ year that are tagged with "words" or in the Language category. I can cheat and add "2009" to a Google search, but this matches the copyright notice. I can exclude the copyright notice, but this would exclude everything.

Reading every page in the language category, I can't find it.

I can use site:ask.metafilter.com all I like, but unless I search for "Jan 1 2009" OR "Jan 2 2009" I get too many results.

How do others do this?

posted by devnull to MetaFilter-Related at 4:52 AM (12 comments total)

Since it was recent, I would just go to the list of all posts tagged with "words" and the Writing & Language archives and scroll down until you find it. Both pages are listed in reverse chronological order, so if it was really within the past four weeks it shouldn't take all that long.
posted by Johnny Assay at 5:11 AM on January 29, 2009

I went through the thread list for the tags "words, word, definition, definitions, language, writing, vocabulary, etymology, thesaurus, dictionary" and couldn't find the question you were looking for. Do you know if it was a recent question, or whether it was in the archives?

Otherwise, the taglist is your friend.
posted by Phire at 5:20 AM on January 29, 2009

If you use Google's advanced search you can specify the domain plus the date.
posted by inigo2 at 6:40 AM on January 29, 2009

Well I'll be damned if I can't find it either. I did some site searches via google, some philosophy tag searches, and then i pulled up the archives for the last 2 months and did some control+f searches for stuff like "words", "means", "term" and "consistent". I know the question you're talking about - I remember it also.
posted by cashman at 6:41 AM on January 29, 2009

I remember reading the question, so it does (or did) exist.
posted by cjorgensen at 7:00 AM on January 29, 2009

Was it this?
posted by atrazine at 7:32 AM on January 29, 2009 [1 favorite]

Nope - this was more of a personal thing - like if you practiced kindness and benevolence at home, you do it at work, you do it in your social life, you do it as a student, you do it when you're grocery shopping, on vacation, visiting relatives. And the question was looking for a term that encapsulated that (that already existed, I believe).
posted by cashman at 7:50 AM on January 29, 2009

Or shit, maybe I'm crazy and that was it.
posted by cashman at 7:53 AM on January 29, 2009

This one?
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 8:24 AM on January 29, 2009

I think atrazine has it. That's the one I remember, anyway.
posted by salvia at 8:45 AM on January 29, 2009

atrazine has it: parsimony! Thanks very much :)

How did you find it though?
posted by devnull at 10:06 AM on January 29, 2009

devnull,

I remember commenting in that thread. I just scrolled back through my recent ask activity.
posted by atrazine at 4:58 AM on February 1, 2009