the.com/extremist
Someone so sure of the exit that they forget there's a middle of the road.
means Someone holding or pushing views that fall far outside what their society considers mainstream or moderate, often favoring drastic action to achieve them.
from Built simply from 'extreme' — from Latin 'extremus,' the superlative of 'exter' (outer), meaning 'outermost' or 'last' — plus the agent-ish suffix '-ist,' which turns a quality into a person who embodies or champions it. The word picked up its political charge in the 19th century, when writers started using 'extremist' to brand people at the far edges of a movement, the ones who wouldn't settle for the comfortable center everyone else was standing in.
- origin
- from Latin extremus, meaning outermost
- irony
- centrists get called extremist by both sides
- psychology
- certainty rises as nuance disappears
- label trap
- one era's extremist is another's statesman