Poly Semantics
Hey, polys, I know that we like to make up our own terminology and stuff, and I actually think that's great. I think it's both useful and humorous.
BUT WORDS MEAN THINGS!
I mean, sure, living language, words evolve and all that, but poly terminology is LITERALLY LESS THAN A GENERATION OLD. Most of the people who coined the various words are still alive.
Could we, like, not start making words mean their opposite while the people who coined them are still alive to define them?
We ARE all about "communication, communication, communication", yes? I know this is a radical concept, but communication is *easier* when everyone in the conversation is using the same fucking definitions for the same words. Sure, there are no thought police, nobody is going to drag you off to poly jail for using a word differently. But you're making things more difficult for everyone, yourself included, by just arbitrarily making words mean their opposite.
Can we just agree to use the words as defined at least as long as the person who coined them (or popularized them) is still alive and can confirm its intended definition? Can we make our own vocabulary just last at least as long as that?
Here's something that just occurred to me that I wonder about.
So, the poly "community", the concept, whatever, has been mostly led by women or non-cis men identified persons. I'm going to stick with the term "women" for right now because the original pioneers and the largest names with the widest reach all used that term. Point is, women have been at the forefront of the poly "movement" from the beginning. Literally, both the people tagged with coining the word "polyamory" are women.
Because women have been the bulk of the supporters and champions of polyamory, women have been the coiners of most of our vocabulary.
I get into a *lot* of semantics debates around poly terminology. People insist that words mean their opposites all the time, which is frustrating in general, but in the poly community, the people who coined, popularized, or invented our terms are mostly all still alive and we can *ask* them what the word means.
But people will tell those coiners, *to their faces*, that the words they invented do not mean what they created them to mean.
And because it just occurred to me, as I was thinking over the last 20 years of all the arguments I've had on poly semantics and who came up with which terms, that the vast majority of people I have had to defend as being term-coiners, have been women.
So now I wonder ... if men had developed all these terms, would we still be arguing about their definition? Would so many people so vociferously declare to the person who invented a word that "language evolves"? How much of the willingness to tell someone that their own word does not belong to them anymore and we can use it however we like is related to our cultural willingness to dismiss women's ideas, ignore women, 'splain to women, and take credit for women's contributions?
How much of our semantics debates are related to some deeply internalized misogyny? How often do we arbitrarily change the definitions of terms because we, as a culture and we subconsciously as individuals, do not give women the authority to define and shape our communities?
These are all rhetorical questions. I am not looking for anyone to answer them because I don't think they can be answered. I just noticed a pattern, because pattern-recognition is one of the things I'm particularly good at. It might be nothing.
But it might be that, even in a woman-led movement and among women ourselves, we still don't give women the credit that they deserve.
This post was originally posted at https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/399619.html.
This blog has been moved to https://joreth.dreamwidth.org/ due to the new Russian laws regarding LGBTQ content. The new blog will continue to cross-post to LiveJournal as long as the LJ blog still stands but comments at LJ have been disabled. Please update your RSS feeds for my new home.