commenter vs. commentator

[Dan Goncharoff]

That's not quite how I understand it.

To me, a commentator produces commentary. This can be done in a variety
of forms, from live broadcast (say, during a sporting event) to tweets.
I agree there is a presumption that a commentator's output is
"authoritative, reputable, prestigious", but there is also a sense of
continuity that goes beyond a comment.

A commenter produces one or more comments in response to a blog post.

DanG

On 6/21/2010 12:03 PM, Joel S. Berson wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society<ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Joel S. Berson"<Berson at ATT.NET>
> Subject:      Re: commenter vs. commentator
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> A commentator is an authoritative, reputable, prestigious commenter.
>
> Joel
>
> At 6/21/2010 11:15 AM, Judy Prince wrote:
>
>
>> Hi, Amy, thank you for raising this up-to-the-second discussion.
>>
>> Help me understand your distinction between the two word uses:  " . .
>> . the author and editors probably chose to use "commenter" because of the
>> difference between posting discrete comments to a number of stories as
>> opposed to creating a unified commentary."
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Judy
>>
>> On 21 June 2010 14:42, Amy West<medievalist at w-sts.com>  wrote:
>>
>>
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>>> Sender:       American Dialect Society<ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>> Poster:       Amy West<medievalist at W-STS.COM>
>>> Subject:      commenter vs. commentator
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>> On a social list of mine recently a lot of folks revealed their language
>>> peeves, many of which were standard peever fodder (utilize vs. use, try
>>> and vs. try to, etc.), and which I responded to with excerpts from MWDEU
>>> and Huddleston&  Pullum's Students Intro. One of the peeves was
>>> "commentator."
>>>
>>> So I noticed a use of "commenter" vs. "commentator" in a Boston Globe
>>> Magazine article yesterday. It was about heavy users of newspaper
>>> discussion boards or the comment function of online newspaper articles.
>>>
>>> "Occasionally, he'll commit the common commenter sin of weighing in on
>>> an article without having read it. . . . But, overall, he plays by the
>>> rules, works hard at this commenter job of his, and, in a way serves his
>>> community." -- Neil Swidey, "Two Cents in the Digital Age," Boston Globe
>>> Magazine, 20 June 2010, p. 20.
>>>
>>> I'm probably reading too much into this semantically, but the author and
>>> editors probably chose to use "commenter" because of the difference
>>> between posting discrete comments to a number of stories as opposed to
>>> creating a unified commentary.
>>>
>>> I apologize if there's already stuff about this in the archives.
>>>
>>> ---Amy West
>>>
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>>>
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