Grant shares a word he’s been encountering at conferences: discussant. A discussant is someone who, after a series of papers are presented, takes the microphone to summarize the information given and offer opinions on the matter. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Discussant”
I go to a lot of professional conferences, usually about language and linguistics, and sometimes about journalism and internet-y types of things.
I bet parties are great.
They action parties are the reason that you go because that’s where the real relationships are formed, right? The real deals are struck outside of the conference rooms.
And one of the words that I keep coming across that I finally wrote down and kind of did a little digging on is the word discussant.
So you go to a conference and there are people who present and there are presenters and there are people who might moderate a panel. So there’s moderators and there are panelists as well.
But the discussant is the person after, say, a series of papers on one topic are presented. Like four papers are all talking about generally the same thing.
The discussant will summarize those papers and give their own opinion of the data or evidence that were presented. And it’s usually kind of on the fly. They’re taking notes as those papers are being presented. They might have seen a preprint or something in advance.
But that’s the discussant. It’s an interesting word, and I see the need for the role, and therefore I see the need for the word.
And are you live blogging it? I mean, this is so interesting.
No, no, but it’s to the crowd who is present usually.
Yeah, yeah, we’ll have to watch that one.
I’m a big fan of new words. You can send the ones that you found to words@waywordradio.org or call us and tell us about them, 877-929-9673.
