What Does "Conservative" Mean?

[ICantSpellDawg]

No, wrong, if they want to keep the status quo they're conservatives, not reactionaries.

Reactionaries would want whatever you had before the status quo.
Conservatives want to keep the status quo.
And progressives want to move on beyond the status quo.

That should be the terminology and I think that's what the opening post was aiming at, that many use the terms completely wrong or associate certain political aims with them when in reality the terms don't have anything to do with any aims because they are completely relative to the status quo.

It's also save to say that it's usually relative to the topic, you can be conservative in this regard and progressive in another, as a whole it would then be best to describe you as a human being or if you want, perhaps as the prevalent notion, like conservative when on 80% of the political topics you have a conservative stance, butt you can still be progressive or reactionary about this or that, although that should be self-explanatory.

Noble sentiment, but it still doesn't solve the problem of "what should we call an individual?". There is no single definition that would apply to an individual and any attempt is rather futile.

What are socialists? Progressives, even though they seek to restore old concepts and ways of governance? Even if they would modify tried and failed government to work, how is that really different from conservative who want the old modified to last as well?