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Tree Sayings

Jan 28, 2022

English has common idioms using trees. Here is one which means that you cannot see the big picture because of focussing too much on the details; the overall view is sacrificed to the minor parts:
You can't see the woods for the trees.
This saying is very much in use today, yet it dates back at least to the sixteenth century!

Another, later, idiom, comes from America and the nineteenth century:
Barking up the wrong tree.
The background is that dogs, originally hunting dogs, were barking by a tree which they believed to shelter an animal; however, the animal had escaped onto another tree. Nowadays, this expression is very much used, and it means that you are looking in the wrong place, or are pursuing the wrong course of action to get something.

Now here is an idiom which looks as if it refers directly to a tree, but does not!
Turning over a new leaf.
This expression makes to make a fresh start, to do something differently and better. However, the leaf here does not mean the leaf of a tree; it means the page of a book, and it has been used in this sense again at least from the sixteenth century. The saying is common today.
 
 
 


Copper beech tree in Oxfordshire. By Graham Horn, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13745078
 
 

This column was published by the author in their personal capacity.
The opinions expressed in this column are the author's own and do not reflect the view of Cafetalk.

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