"I cannot resist observing how people who act on their beliefs are currently labelled activists, as if the norm were to have ideas and beliefs and do nothing about them.
Adding the "ists" to the verb, lumps such people along with communists, socialists, feminists, environmentalists, etc, all of whom we are supposed to assume represent a tiny minority of extremists.
In such a way the integrity of the community is broken up into tiny, impotent, single-agenda fragments.
When I was young, we called people who did not act on their beliefs, hypocrites.
Who and what is served by this change in terminology ?"