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Reader question: What does “toss straws in the wind” means in the following sentence? If a government is to have any value, it should lead the country where knowledge and understanding take it, not toss straws in the wind to find out which drifts farthest. My comments: The answer is blowing in the wind, as Bob Dylan sings. Literally, the answer is in the wind. Straws are light, loose ends of, say, dried wheat stems. If you toss them in the wind, they’ll blow away – wherever the wind takes them. This is a situation hardly imaginable by kids in the city, but if you have any experience in the country, you’ll know tossing straws in the wind is just another folksy way to see where wind is blowing. Farmer’s wisdom, that is. An American idiom, straws in the wind apparently alludes to this age-old practice by farmers everywhere. Politically, however, if you toss straws in the wind, you want to see what voters want. In America, for instance, public opinion polls are often called straw polls, i.e. surveys which metaphorically speaking toss straws in the wind to see to which direction voters lean – toward either Democrats or Republicans. In our example from the top, the government in question is criticized for failing to have an opinion of its own (because of a great lack of wisdom, which, in fact, is not uncommon in any government around the world). All it does is to conduct straw polls to find out what the voting trends are and then follow voters’ direction. | 
