deviationist means one who deviates from accepted beliefs or policies, especially from a prescribed form of Communism. It carries an Arena rating of 1068, earned across 246 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, deviationist ranks #868 of 17,138 for Most Incisive Words, #2,448 of 17,128 for Most Ponderous Words, #2,886 of 17,131 for Scariest Words, #5,193 of 17,127 for Words That Escaped Their Books.
Why “deviationist” is a great word
DEVIATIONIST — [Noun] One who departs from officially accepted beliefs or policies, particularly within a rigid political orthodoxy. From deviation (from Latin via Medieval Latin, meaning "a turning aside") + -ist (agent suffix). Unlike a "dissenter," who withholds general assent, or a "revisionist," who seeks to amend a doctrine from within, a deviationist has merely strayed from the prescribed path. It is the comrade whose foot falls a half-step out of cadence, the sentence in a report that fails to mirror the approved phrasing, the figure in the group photograph who appears, by a trick of light, to be looking elsewhere—a small, private heresy that becomes, in the paranoid geometry of ideology, a capital crime of trajectory.
Etymology
From deviation + -ist.
noun
- One who deviates from accepted beliefs or policies, especially from a prescribed form of Communism.
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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