|
Noah -> RE: Power Enhancement Relationship Dynamic with Authority Transfer (4/12/2008 4:35:46 PM)
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: Poetryinpain
quote:
ORIGINAL: Noah
"Authority" and "power" have enough semantic overlap (you can swap them back & forth with no ill effects in enough kinds of sentences) that I don't notice any improvement in clarity resulting from abandoning a fairly sturdy and well-established expression like power exchange for the new one "authority transfer." The new one doesn't highlight anything much new in my mind and sounds kind of bureaucratic-ish in the bargain.
They may be sometimes used interchangeably, but they have subtly different meanings. Authority implies a right, and power implies the ability or capacity. My take on this is that someone with authority has to be granted that authority, whereas someone with power has that power inherently.
pip, the word nerd
MMhmm. And you're entitled to your take. Now please consider:
The Justice of the Peace says to your friends at teh courthouse: "By the power vested in me by the Commonwealth of Rhode Island I now pronounce you man and wife." This is clearly a case of "granted" capacity which is standardly known and referred to as power, not authority.
An infinite supply exists of other examples of common usage which blurs, ignores or contradicts your schema.
Please understand that I agree that two sorts of phenomena exists where one is well accounted for by the way you describe the meaning of power and where the other is well accounted for by the way you describe the meaning of authority. I just don't see Justices of the Peace (nor anyone else very generally) restricting their usages of those two words inthe way that your verbal diagram suggests.
Even adopting for the moment your strict labelling of this dichotomy, please consider these two pairs of people.
Pair A includes some subbie I've never met or heard of, who lives across town, and me.
Pair B includes the same subbie and the Dominant partner she has devoted herself to these past two years in a deep, rich, and thriving relationship.
Now, setting aside authority in your sense of the term, who do you think has more power (again, in your semse of the term) over this subbie? Who has more power to please her? To thrill her? To annoy her? To help her? To hurt her (especially emotionally but even in other ways)?
I suggest that her Dom, in addition to having gained authority over her (in your sense) is also likely to have gained power over her. If nothing else consider the power inherent in the knowledge of a person's deepest feelings, fears, aspirations and secrets.
Even if the subbie revokes the grant by which his "authority" was obtained, the Dom very likely retains some significant capacity or ability to be a friend or enemy to her, capacity which I, not being her Dom, simply don't have. That capacity, in your terms as I understand them, is power, not authority. And he got that power only in virtue of her exchanging it for (whatever it was she got out of the relationship).
Am I making sense?
|
|
|
|
