Semantics

While snooping around the message boards and libraries of online BDSM communities (which, thus far, has been my only source for information outside of introspection) I have come to one very clear conclusion:

The BDSM community cannot seem to agree on a universal set of definitions for commonly used vocabulary.

One person's slave is another person's poser. One person's punishment is another person's play. One person's idea of fun is pretend and role-play while another person takes everything to it's most literal real word application. But everyone is using the same words, for these very different lifestyles and concepts.

It is entirely contextual.

And deeply confusing for me, as I don't have my mind made up what my personal definitions are.

Admittedly there clearly are a variety of different sub-groups of like minded individuals that seem to be able to get on talking together with a certain amount of agreement- but as there seem (at least to me) to be about as many different groups of like minded individuals as there can possibly be based around a single core concept.

(Train of thought derailment... I wonder if that is a factor in how the Gor community came into being. I mean  I just doubt/wonder if there would naturally be that many people with the exact same brand of kink. I can imagine that a well flushed out set of values, lifestyle, and verbage would be appealing, especially to an uncertain newcomer. Regardless of if it exactly matched a person's individuality, have a foundation to work with could be, er, relieving.)

Anyway, I guess that I notice people arguing semantics a lot of time rather than openly reading what a person's intent is in their forum post and replying to their true statement. 

Everyone is just going, "It depends on what your meaning of 'is' is,"