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Suleiman -> RE: Just a quick question about W/we etc :-) (11/4/2004 12:43:47 PM)
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Short answer is that there is a tradition, not used by the whole community, where a dominant is referred to with a capital letter (He, Bob, is Dominant) while submissives are always referred to with a lower case letter (she, sally, is submissive). As to how this tradition came to be, allow me to tell you a little fable:
Long before I, luddite that I am, came to rest my shaggy gaze upon this thing they call an internet, there was a time before AOL, before unlimited useage for a set fee. In this time before, users had to pay a fee for the bandwith they used, and this fee was charged by the minute, or some times by the word. Many used the internet, but found the costs prohibitive, and so they came up with ways of reducing their expenses by taking shortcuts. Some would replace letters for homophonic words (such as typing U R rather than you are), others found acronyms that they could use for simple concepts (such as rotfl).
In this time before, perverts also gathered in the internet, and they had the same expensive problem. Some would mark their dominance by the use of capital letters (Me, You, Them, Us), others would show thier submission by the use of lower case letters (me, you, them, us). Some would use brackets to indicate that they were collared. Many other conventions were established during this time, when internet access was expensive, and the internet-based community spread out in scattered groupings.
Then came the dawning of a new light, and the eternal august of the internet. Newcomers flooded in and began to peruse the ancient text-filled haunts of their hoary elders. The conventions of an earlier time became the traditions of the newcomers. Few, if any, of those who remember the time before bother with these conventions now, but still new people enter the chat rooms and message boards and learn of these things, and like children coming to understand that girls wear dresses and boys wear pants, they insist that the rote tradition continues as a blind homage to those who came before.
My mother is fond of telling a story about a family tradition gone awry. This fable speaks of a young housewife who, in the process of preparing the family dinner, asks her husband for a hacksaw. Why does she need a hacksaw to make dinner? he inquires of her. She explains that it is to cut the bone off of the end of the ham. Why should you want to do that? he asks her. She replies that that is how her family has always done it. Confused but satisfied, the young husband finds for his wife a saw. Later, the young newlywed inquires of her mother why she cut the bone off of the ham before roasting it. The mother replies that she dosen't really know, but that's how her mother always did it. Many months pass, and then a family reuinion comes about, and the young newlywed has the opportunity to converse with her grandmother. Why is it, she inquires, that she always cuts the bone off of the ham? Well you see, explains the grandmother, when I was a newlywed, we had a very tiny little apartment, and the oven wasn't very big, so I had to cut the bone off to make the ham fit inside!
Much like the housewife in this fable, many internet players insist on using this rote tradition of Dominance and submission without really bothering to find out why it is the way it is.
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