Counterculturists

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. People who resist or challenge conventional cultural standards
2. Individuals who engage in social movements that question mainstream values and encourage new cultural expressions
3. Those who oppose dominant societal norms and advocate for alternative lifestyles and ideas

Etymology: Counterculturists are, by construction, people defined against the mainstream culture they reject. The word is built from "counterculture" plus the suffix "-ist", which marks a person who follows or practises something. Its history is therefore the history of its parts: "counter" arrived in English from Old French "contre", which came from Latin "contra", meaning "against" or "opposite", and "culture" came into English from Middle French, ultimately from Latin "cultura", a word for tilling and tending the land. The "-ist" suffix has a longer road. It descends through Latin "-ista" from Ancient Greek "-istēs", an agent ending attached to verbs and nouns, and it reached English through Old French, so a word like this one combines an agricultural image of cultivation with a Latin preposition meaning opposition. The base word "counterculture" is the key to the whole form. Once that compound existed, adding "-ist" produced a label for individuals who belonged to it, and the plural "counterculturists" simply names more than one such person.