Stop using the term ‘centrist’. It doesn’t mean what you think it does | Arwa Mahdawi

If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy, wrote Orwell. That applies today more than ever

I would like to start a petition for journalists - and everyone else - to immediately stop using the C-word. Centrist. It's an insidious word that has degraded how we think about politics and distorted how we see the world.

Perhaps that statement sounds a little over the top. After all, being a centrist" sounds eminently reasonable, doesn't it? A centrist is a moderate, right? Someone who is rational and practical and takes the middle ground. Someone who isn't extreme like those crazy ideologues on the far right or far left. A centrist, logic dictates, is really what everyone should strive to be.