Hi, can you please tell me what ‘winging’ means in the following sentence? Many thanks.
Turns out winging a pandemic is not a successful health nor economic strategy.
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To do or try to do something without much practice or preparation. Wing it Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster.
But l do not know the meaning of " winging a pandemic" in this sentence.
May it mean “indifference or insecurity”.
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It sounds like the government is making up their pandemic response as they go along.
They’re flying by the seat of their pants.
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Thank you very much for this explanation. I ran the sentence through DeepL and the machine failed, as you can see here: DeepL Translate: The world's most accurate translator.
Then Mona posted the Webster definition and it made sense, and now you have confirmed it.
I use “wing it” a lot. It means doing something without any planning. More specifically it means something that you probably should plan, but don’t. You would not make a plan to get the mail, so spontaneously getting the mail with no plan is not “winging it.”. However if you want to do a complex task it might be very helpful to have a good plan. If you just start with no plan, hoping for the best, you are winging it.
Similar sayings and words are:
Play by ear
Ad lib ( usually used for music, but can be used in other ways )
Dive right in
Off the top of your head
Off the cuff
Improvise
As for the COVID pandemic, I think the whole world winged it. (Yes, “wing it” is a verb with tenses) It amazes me that virtually every country has agencies whose job it is to deal with these things, and they were totally unprepared. Well, next time maybe they’ll have a better plan. There WILL be a next time and it potentially could be a heck of a lot worse.
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I think the machine translation may have had a problem because you actually wing your response to the pandemic. The original requires a little bit of a leap or assumption to get the meaning.
The U.S. had a plan in the White House for pandemic preparedness following the SARS epidemic, but it never got any traction with anyone else because it was never today’s problem. It was moved to Homeland Security and repurposed to bio-weapon response.
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You are right. Changing the original sentence has also improved the translation, at least somewhat:
DeepL Translate: The world's most accurate translator.
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I think it is a metaphor meaning ‘facilitating the spread’ or ‘enabling to permeate throughout’.
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