For the last couple of centuries, the word ‘‘radical’’ referred to people who try to pull things up from the root. After the Civil War, Radical Republicans, as they were called, pushed Reconstruction policies through Congress on behalf of freed slaves, trying to tear down the plantation-based power structure of the antebellum South. Eugene Debs, the most prominent socialist of the early 20th century (and a hero to Bernie Sanders), ran for president five times on what was seen as a radical platform of condemning capitalist oppression.
Change that is ‘‘radical’’ is ‘‘essential and fundamental’’ or ‘‘far-reaching,’’ according to the Oxford English Dictionary. About 50 years ago, surfers pressed ‘‘radical’’ into service to describe extreme waves. It became generic slang for anything remarkable or worthy of attention, sometimes shortened to ‘‘rad’’ and often paired with ‘‘totally.’’ In its other meanings, ‘‘radical’’ has retained its potency as well as a hint of the uncontrollable. (In chemistry, ‘‘free radicals’’ are especially jittery atoms containing unpaired electrons.) ‘‘Radical chic’’ was the mocking phrase Tom Wolfe coined in New York magazine in 1970 for the celebrity feting of militants. Reeling off a list of attendees at a party in Leonard Bernstein’s Manhattan penthouse, he built to the crescendo ‘‘. . . and now, in the season of Radical Chic, the Black Panthers.’’
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