Philosophical Semantics, Part II

If you feel strongly about it, I'll consider not nominating the words. (I don't plan on deciding either way for several weeks.) It's true that the words haven't appeared (to my knowledge) on Ppercs per se, so I guess Ppercs has less of a "vested interest" in them.

I would say that it is the Poly Percs membership who should tell you what to include or not in their glossary. We have our own.

I'm curious, though... I noticed there was an entry in your glossary for "24/7" and the definition was related to BDSM.

Come on now, really? Someone needs a glossary to know that 24/7 means 24 hours/7 days a week?

Besides, it isn't only a BDSM term. Just because it's used to refer to certain activities does not make the meaning only related to those activities.

What was the thinking behind including such a common, every day term? If someone says, "Oh, they have a 24/7 master-slave relationship," I highly doubt anyone will drop their jaw and ask what "24/7" means.
 
Sure, the 24/7 entry has something of a "superfluous" quality. But it's not the only entry like that. For instance, someone (somewhat recently) asked me to add an entry for "love." Most people have a pretty good idea of what love means, and the person asking for the addition didn't offer anything "new" for the definition that people would have been unaware of. But, the person asked, no one objected, so I figured it was okay to add it. The history behind the 24/7 entry is probably similar, although that was added quite awhile ago and my memory doesn't serve me as well on that.

The main harm I could see coming from it was that many such superfluous entries will add up to a sizeable percentage of a lengthy glossary, with a lot of terms to comb through before one finds the actual term one is looking for. But I think I can live with that harm; the superfluous entries do reflect something of the flavor of the site, and what terms have often come up in conversations, or at least come up in one or two "hot topic" conversations. And whatever the reason may be for nominating a term, I feel okay about relying on the Ppercs membership to strike the idea down if it needs to be struck down. It's not hard; one or two votes almost always does the trick. I guess the bottom line is, some entries are just "flavor entries," and the active part of Ppercs has never seemed to mind.

People could nominate new words they hear about from other sites, and I'm sometimes guilty of doing so. But any entry can be "voted back out" at any time, whether in the nomination stage, or the already-in-the-glossary stage. I keep copies of all the prior versions of the glossary so that any entry (or recent change to any entry) can easily be reversed.
 
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