One of the trends I've been seeing these past few weeks on ELL is a lot of questions like [What does 'onding on snaw' mean?](https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/2740/what-does-onding-on-snaw-mean), where I find it difficult to justify the question as something of general interest to someone learning English as a foreign language, since the text is severely out of kilter with modern English.

My original thought was to discuss whether such questions belong on ELL at all (since they seem to me to be more questions suited to ELU than to ELL, since they discuss esoteric language rather than modern English for learners).

After some deliberation, I've concluded that these questions belong *somewhere*, and if they are to belong on ELL, they should probably be tagged in such a way that they don't confuse a learner into assuming that these words are something you should use in ordinary formal or informal speech and writing.

So anyway, I think there's a couple of approaches that we could take here. Feel free to vote on one of them below, or add your own if you think it's not covered.

Please vote UP suggestions that you like, rather than DOWN suggestions that you don't.