David Silverman goes into this extensively in his book Fighting God.
When we use other terms for Atheist pople do not know what we are talking about. There are so many Euphemisms out there that staistics show atheist as bing around 5% of our population(in the U.S.) where the actual demographics when all the Euphemisms are taken into account is much closer to 1/3 of the nation.

I'm with David Silverman on this one we should use the term atheist. People have at least an idea of what it means. When we use the term we normalize atheism and make atheist more acceptable.

Gay at one time was a derogatory term. The LGBT movement owned it! Now it is simply a descriptive term of ones sexuality.

Define realist

i prefer it really

I like it. But I kind of doubt it would get anywhere, because everybody thinks they're realists. I have said elsewhere that I hate being labeled as "not something", even though I know my world is full of sky-god-believers who think that not believing is somehow deviant.