terms of endearment

i've spent a lot of the last year examining the terms i use to describe myself - my "identifiers". i came to love my labels, mixing them up at will and sorting them out. sometimes i'd throw one out the window, only to chase it down later and add it to my pile. others i've clung to for years, and finally managed to eradicate.

but i'm stuck these days on the other part of the formula, the ones we use for our - ah - "tops". now, in my training oh-so-long-ago, a top was defined as the person on the do-er side, rather than the do-ee. generally, this was understood to be the sadist, the dominant, the master, the pirate king, the knot-tying-expert. not all together, necessarily, but the person taking on that part of the scene or relationship. the concept always interested me, because you didn't have to be dominant, for example, to be the one wielding, say, the signal whip, (this fascinated me for reasons obvious to those who know my history and - ah - skillset - with signal whips.) and you could still be considered a "top". i'm not sure if this theoretically made/makes me a switch, but as someone Important says, whatever for that.

now i'm thinking through the difference between "Master/Mistress" and "owner". i've come to terms with the idea that i am "property". i'm not currently a slave - and i'm okay with that - but definitely property.

so what makes someone a Master rather than an owner? i'm thinking that it's partly by owning a slave that one becomes a Master. that would be interesting, because it's a backwards way of defining the "top". i'm open to thoughts on this - yes, it's mostly semantics, but with common terms and language, our perverted minds can explode that much faster.