real-worlder

real world +‎ -er

real-worlder (plural real-worlders)

1. Synonym of realist, a practical person who lives in the real world as distinguished from those perceived to inhabit cloudcuckooland or similarly detached from reality in some way.
   • 1965, The Politics of Military Policy: Seminars on the Politics of Policy-making‎, page 12:

     Another trouble within this schematic diagram is that within each school there is a division between the "real worlders"--those who recognize the world is complicated--and the "gimmicksters"--those who want to depend on a once-and-for-all problem-solving gimmick.

   • 2002, Yale H. Ferguson, Richard W. Mansbach, “Remapping Political Space: Issues and Nonissues in Analyzing Global Politics in the Twenty-First Century”, in Yale H. Ferguson, R. J. Barry Jones, editors, Political Space: Frontiers of Change and Governance in a Globalizing World, →ISBN, page 89:

     The scholars who found the postmodernists most outrageous were those who thought they actually were discussing the “real world.” […] What the real-worlders missed was that the extreme relativists were engaged in games of a yet another sort, language games, with double entendres and other clever word-play.

   • 2016, Maarten Rothman, “Theory for Real-Worlders: Teaching International Security Studies to Dutch Cadets”, in Infinity Journal Special Edition: International Relations in Professional Military Education‎, page 20:

     Our approach privileges the perspective of military practice. In the tutorial sessions, we put real-worlders in charge.