I am going to start filtering some of my more private musings. Since blogger does not have a tool for that, you will need to visit my Live Journal and ask to be friended there. I will continue to post Daily Gratitude and other subjects here. There is also a FAQ for my Journal at the same link.
| Sunday, March 03, 2002 @ 11:25 I had a number of interesting conversations on IRC yesterday. One involved how to define "boi" and another how to define "fucking" (which expanding to include defining sex, making love, torture, and other relates terms). Lastly I had a private conversation about the definition of "slut". The only conclusions reached were that we don't have enough words available in our language to label everyone and everything accurately and people take great liberties with words that have specific, dictionary definitions. I've talked some (not sure if it was in this Journal or the Perceptions on DM's Realm) about the word slave maybe not being accurate to my goals. While the dictionary assures me that there are more definitions of the word slave than the forced socio-political servitude of racial and economic castes, I'm still not sure the remaining definitions are 100% accurate to my needs. Argue all you want, but the dictionary does not demand legal authority nor preclude consent from one labeled a slave. You can be a non-legal, consenting slave. You can be a slave and have the right/ability to walk away. However, I'm not sure if "thrall" or "property" would be better choices for what I seek. Or, maybe, as we discovered yesterday, there isn't a single word for what I want. The problem comes in hundreds of people deciding to redefine words to suit their needs-- in stories, books, articles, on websites, in conversation. Or creating phrases like "consensual slavery" or "internal enslavement" to describe their relationship processes. The truth remains that while they may convert a few (or a dozen or dozens) of people to their definitions, it doesn't make the definitions accurate. Yes, language evolves. Yes, there are now a few cyber words in the unabridged dictionary. However, a decision by a few dozen people (or even a few hundred) to use any of these bastardized definitions as fact, doesn't change the actual definition. And it's quite doubtful that a minority, alternative community is going to affect the usage of the majority to evolve a true expansion of the language. I'm not going back into my websites to change all references to the word "slave" or any other word I defined internally over the past four years. However, I have become much more conscious in my use of language and plan to be more cautious going forward.
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