The past tense of the verb "wing" should be "wung".
"I wasn't sure what key the song was in, so I just wung it and it turned out OK."
@benhamill Alternately, you could make a case for "wought" a la brought.
This also made me wonder if "wrought" is somehow derived from an alternate past tense of "wring" (it almost works!) but alas, it seems the two are not related.
@benhamill
Oh. This. This makes my language centers hurt. 😜
@cincodenada You're looking for the verb "wright", I believe. As in a shipwright... someone who wrights ships.
@benhamill Well I'll be damned, so I am, I'd never made that connection before! Thanks!
And to think I was just reading about fossil words, which is when obsolete words get preserved in expressions or compounds like this. Neato!
@cincodenada I’m Ben Hamill and this has been _your_ Linguistics Minute.
@benhamill
Why are there no Wongs in the Chinese phonebook?
You might wing a wong number.
@sunfun Hey friend, I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're just repeating this old chestnut without thinking about it.
But please reconsider this post. This joke turns entirely on "haha non-native speakers have funny names and talk funny" which is pretty shitty to those folks and is racist as heck, regardless of your intent, and is probably against your server TOS to boot.
We all gotta learn sometime ❤️
@benhamill I regret to inform you that this example made me realize that if we're paralleling other -ing words like "sing", "spring", "bring", "wring", then "wung" should be the past *participle*. Since your example is simple past tense, it would be..."wang" 😂😭