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Reader question: When a meeting is described as “producing a lot of dead air”, what does it mean? My comments: It means there is a lot of silence during the meeting, that’s all. Awkward silence, needless to say. Dead, as in dead silent, dead air means silence on the radio. Ongoing radio programs are described as “on the air” because radio transmission does seem to arrive at the listener’s home via thin air. Anyways, dead air refers to a moment of inadvertent silence during a radio broadcast, due to a technical glitch or a loss for words by some speaker. When that happens, the listeners hears nothing, of course and if that happens a lot, you can imagine that the situation can become very awkward indeed. Quite weird, even uncanny, as a matter of fact. Likewise, in a meeting or conversation, the period or periods of time during which no one speaks can make everyone feel equally awkward and uncomfortable. Perhaps the participants don’t like each other or they disagree on everything or something. And the general atmosphere of the meeting is, as you can imagine, not lively at all. So, in short, if a meeting or conversation produces “a lot of dead air”, it is not very productive. In other words, there’s no agreement. Everyone goes away empty handed and the meeting feels like a total waste of time, or something like that. Alright, no more ado, let’s read more media examples of “dead air” to hammer the point firmly home: | 
