Play out
Today’s English expression is a phrasal verb, “play out.” We use this when we’re talking about how a complicated situation develops. In today’s lesson, you heard that citizens and military analysts around the world can see how the war in Ukraine is playing out by monitoring social media and other crowd-sourced intelligence like satellite photos. In previous wars, only governments had this information, and they didn’t have it right away. Historians would later go in and research how the war played out. But at the time, citizens couldn’t see how military conflicts were playing out, beyond limited press reports.
“Let’s see how this plays out,” is a very common phrase to use when you want to say, “Let’s see how this situation develops,” or “Let’s see what happens in this complicated situation.”
When I’m not working on Plain English, I work in business consulting. And in consulting, we always have to go out and win new projects. It’s very common to have meetings with potential clients to talk about what they might need, what we have to offer, and whether it would make sense to work together. So when we have meetings with potential clients, we have a couple of options. We could directly ask them to buy our services, or we could be a little less direct about it. We could offer to have another meeting, to send them some information, to make an introduction, whatever the case may be. The ultimate objective is to win the work, but it’s not always a good idea to ask for the sale at every meeting.
Anyway, when we prepare for the meeting, we usually know what our strategy is going to be. But sometimes we don’t know in advance if we should be asking for the sale or not. In those cases, we go into the meeting with two options—we either ask for the sale at the end, or we take a less direct approach. And we just wait to see how the meeting plays out.
What does that mean, we wait to see how the meeting plays out? It means we wait to see what happens in the meeting, and only then do we decide what to do. For example, if during the meeting, the clients say they have an immediate need and they’re anxious to solve the problem right away, then that’s our signal that we can make a more direct proposal. If that happens, then we can feel comfortable proposing a project.
But if the client is a little cagey, talking about general needs and desires, and maybe they openly say they’re not sure what their priorities are at the moment, well that’s our signal to be a little more indirect. Maybe at that point, we offer to send some market research we had done to help them think through the issue.
The point is, we wait to see how the meeting plays out. We wait to see what happens, how the situation develops. Only after we see how the meeting plays out do we decide on our strategy.
Right now, I’m watching the NCAA basketball tournament—actually right now, I’m in the recording studio, but when I wrote this lesson, I was watching the tournament. The tournament is a 64-team playoff, where the field narrows from 64 teams to 32, then to 16, then to just eight, and then the final four, then the championship game. I like watching the tournament because it plays out differently every year.
The tournament develops differently every year. In some years, small schools I’ve never heard of before win a few games unexpectedly. That happened this year, with a school called Saint Peter’s, which reached the Sweet 16 round—an impressive performance for a small university. In other years, the top-ranked schools make it all the way and it’s a battle of the most prestigious teams in the final four.
So we can say that the tournament plays out differently every year, meaning that it develops differently each year. And that’s why it’s so exciting. You can also use “play out” to describe how long something takes. For example, the NCAA basketball tournament plays out over three weeks; it’s a three-week-long tournament.
Quote of the Week
Today’s quote of the week is from Simón Bolívar, the “Liberator of South America.” I’m reading a biography of Simón Bolívar now, and each chapter starts with a quote by him or about him. Here’s the one that caught my eye. He said, “The art of victory is learned in failures.” The man had his share of victory and his share of failures, as I’m discovering.
The book jacket—the summary of the book on the inside flap—said that it’s astonishing that more Americans don’t know the name Simón Bolívar, and that’s true. We don’t learn about him or about the independence movement in South America in school here. But we really should, it’s a fascinating history—a brutal one, at times, but also a fascinating one.
See you next time!
Anyway, that’s all for this Plain English. Remember, this was lesson number 456, so the full lesson is available online at PlainEnglish.com/456. Coming up on Thursday: if you’re walking around and you need to get across a major highway, you probably take a bridge. But if you’re an animal, you obviously can’t do that. Or can you? Who knows, we’ll learn more about that together on Thursday’s lesson. See you then.
Use realistic expressions like a native speaker
