Tuesday, June 30, 2009

One day on Fetlife

Sometimes it's better just to blog.

A reply I just didn't feel like posting to Arizonan's comments.

In this "lifestyle" we are all playing fast and loose with words anyways. Summing people up in one word that you can label them with would be convenient, but is pretty ineffective.

We take words and make them sorta kinda fit whatever it is that we like or dislike, or what our lives/dynamics are like. But the real "getting to know people" comes when you talk and find out what makes them tick.

No one here is legally property, but we can certainly identify as that in our dynamic. I think people started migrating towards the term because slave was such a loaded one. It carries a lot of perceptions and misconceptions and expectations and baggage that are irritating to those who do things their own way.

For another example, your girl and I could both consider ourselves wives and yet live very very different lives.

Does the difference in how we are wives mean that one of us isn't really a wife at all? Does it mean that "wife" doesn't mean anything at all? Newp.

I could say "I am so & so's wife." Does that really tell you anything about me whatsoever? I might not even be legally wed. I could be in a "common law" marriage. We could be polygamous. After a bit of conversation, you might be able to figure out what it all means to me, but not just from one word. It might take some time and effort. You might find that your expectations and perceptions about marriage are totally non-applicable. You might find that those expectations, baggage, perceptions and misconceptions need to be discarded in future conversations with people because they apply less and less to the people you meet.

I think it's much better to dismiss those types of things, than people and how they identify and how they live. So cling to your words if you must. I will adapt to my environment and the people who inhabit it.

English is a fabulous language but it is not a simple one. It's constantly evolving and changing. Dialects and colloquialisms & slang abounds. Do you drink soda, pop, fizzy drink or coke? Do you sit on the sofa, chesterfield, loveseat, couch, setee or divan? Check out the urban dictionary sometime and see what words/phrases are developing/getting new meanings every day.

The language we speak now would be almost unrecognizable for Shakespeare or Chaucer. Shakespeare himself was constantly making up new words or defining them differently.

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