Cards left undealt or discarded in certain card games form what is known as a discard . This term is linked to the verb discard , which means to exclude something or someone, to dispense with or not to admit.
In some games , therefore, discarding is leaving the cards in your hand. Cards that are discarded are considered useless and, through discarding, the intention is to replace them with others that have not yet been dealt and that could be more convenient in the game.
At a general level, discard is everything that is not useful or that is left over . Disposable is what can be discarded or is disposable. For example: “The most impoverished sectors of the city are fed with the discards from the most luxurious restaurants” , “The team does not have the money to hire great figures, so they will have to look for reinforcements among the discards from the other clubs” , “ “You cannot build a house with scraps from other works: you run the risk that the safety conditions will not be the best.”
However, in addition to the above, we cannot ignore the fact that within the world of sports it is very common to use the term that we are now analyzing. More specifically, it is used in group disciplines, such as basketball or soccer, to refer to those players that the coach does not call to a game.
A personal decision by the coach, an injury or the risk of suffering a relapse of an illness are some of the reasons that lead the professional who directs the team to consider that one or more players will not be part of it in a match. That is, they will be the discards.
A clear example of this meaning can be the following: "The Spanish coach, Vicente del Bosque, had to establish two discards within the group among the possible players who were going to go to the World Cup and chose Cesc Fábregas and Fernando Torres."
Likewise in the health field, the term discard is also used. In this case, it is used to define all those tests that are performed on a person for any ailment with the clear objective of being able to exclude certain diseases.
In this way, it is common to talk about what is known as ruling out diabetes or ruling out cholesterol, which, as their names indicate, are tests to reject that the person in question suffers from any of these two pathologies that need to have the corresponding treatment.
The discarded material can be thrown into the trash since it is waste (what remains unusable after having completed a job or operation). The reuse of materials is called recycling , a process that gives new life to what was already considered waste.
It can be said, in short, that discarding consists of getting rid of something that, at least for oneself, is of no use at the current moment.