Who has some opinions?

[liv]

Not exactly a shitpost, but an entirely frivolous poll. While I have an influx of new readers!

Consider the expression They can't see the wood for the trees:

Poll #21323 Wood

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 89

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Do you know the expression?

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I am not familiar with the expression
7 (8.2%)

I am familiar with the expression
78 (91.8%)

The 'wood' which someone can't see represents:

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Important features
21 (24.7%)

Minor features
1 (1.2%)

Details
3 (3.5%)

The big picture
78 (91.8%)

Superficial features
2 (2.4%)

Features which require attention to notice
2 (2.4%)

When I think of the 'wood', I imagine

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The substance that the trees are made of
12 (14.6%)

The area of land where the trees are growing
70 (85.4%)

Ticky

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Tickybox
59 (85.5%)

I wish to complain about this poll
15 (21.7%)

Comments

[batrachian]

Every iteration I've heard previously used "forest", not "wood".

[melannen]

+1

That version doesn't have the ambiguity I think the poll is about, so I've always read it as "too focused on details, missed the big picture". .

(If I did hear the wood version, I might assume someone was deliberately going for the opposite, or even something like "too focused on the living community, doesn't see the commodity value".)

[liv]

Aha, that explains a lot. I heard a colleague say can't see the forest for the trees today, and I thought, oh, he's a non-native speaker, he must have heard the ambiguous saying, assumed the "area of land" meaning, and misremembered the exact idiom. But if it's common in some variants of English to say "forest" that does make it much less ambiguous than I'd always believed.

[steorra]

Likewise. So I read it with "wood" meaning "forest" because that's what the version I know means. (And said I'm not familiar with the expression, because in that format I'm not.)

[rushthatspeaks]

+1.

[redbird]

I learned that as "can't see the forest for the trees," which is why it was obvious to me that "wood (= forest) = the big picture."

(This icon isn't really relevant, but it is a tree icon and I don't get many chances to use it.)

[liv]

Treeeeee! Thank you for awesome icon and interesting language information.

also...

[redbird]

"The woods are just trees, the trees are just wood." (from Into the Woods

[randomling]

Huh. My figurative and literal interpretations of that phrase are *entirely at odds*.

Oh wait, no, I'm just brainfogged all to hell. It's about not seeing the big picture for all the details, not the other way around...

[liv]

I did set up the poll in a slightly confusing way, by asking what thing that the person can't see is represented by the wood. Sorry, I couldn't quite think of a better way to ask about the ambiguity.

[aim_of_destiny]

this esl speaker has heard both the 'wood' and the 'forest' iterations of the phrase, and would furthermore like to add that there's a cognate phrase in german:
"(man) sieht den Wald vor lauter Bäumen nicht", which specifically uses a word meaning tract-of-land-fulla-trees (Wald) and not the-material-trees-are-made-of (that would be Holz).

[liv]

Aha, that is a very useful, non-ambiguous German equivalent, thank you.

[antisoppist]

I know my interpretation of it is wrong but as a child I thought it meant that you were too focused on looking at trees to realise that they were made of wood (which is the sort of not-noticing thing that I was always being told off for doing) and extrapolated from that that you were supposed to notice that the trees were made of a useful and valuable substance and that you should be practical and cut them down and make tables or something instead of wasting your time gazing at trees. Sort of the opposite of "consider the lillies of the field".

As an adult I had an "Oh! it's a wood as in forest!" moment and realised it must be meant to be about being too focused on the details to see the bigger picture.

[liv]

You see, I think your child interpretation is quite reasonable. I think the phrase can be used to criticize people for only paying attention to aesthetics and not practicalities.

[forestofglory]

I would also say "forest" rather than wood.

But you'd be interested to know that in the UK forest was historically used to mean game preserve for deer rather than a piece of land with trees. Also historically wood is for burning and lumber is for building. In forest manged by copicing the copice (the bit cut back and allowed to regrow ever 5-20 years) wood was for fuel, and the taller stand trees for lumber.

[steorra]

Timber for building too?

I was thinking that "lumber" in the relevant sense doesn't feel like a medieval word for some reason, and apparently it isn't, while timber goes back to Old English and is derived from from words for building.

[liv]

Nice, thank you for interesting historical language facts. I know what a coppice is but I didn't know about the restricted meaning of lumber.

Have you seen the comment below about a treeless forest? Etymology is so cool :-)

[white_hart]

I don't think of the wood as the area of land the trees are on, so much as the collective entity they make up by occupying that area of land...

[davidgillon]

Yes, that's a good way of expressing my feelings on it, too.

[antisoppist]

I was thinking about the difference between "wood" and "forest" too, which is a thing I often have to think about because I translate into (UK) English from Swedish for a living, and because my idea of what a wood is comes from growing up in England and my idea of what a forest is comes from living in Scandinavia and working with Scandinavians, the distinction I make in my head is that a wood has deciduous trees and a forest has coniferous trees. But I don't know if that is an actual proper distinction.

[liv]

Ooh, interesting. I have no sense that forest means coniferous; you could have a pine wood or an oak forest, neither of those seems outside the central meaning of the word to me. But yes, very different landscapes covered by related words in Sweden and the UK!

[melannen]

Also I have just recalled that when I was young, I hadn't really encountered "for" the way it's used here, so it didn't really make sense to me and I parsed it something like " You can't see that [that] the forest [is] for the trees", which still didn't make a whole lot of sense.

[liv]

Yeah, I think that sense of for is only preserved in idioms. Can't see for looking is another one.

[zhelana]

i think the phrase is "he can't see the woodS for the trees."

[wychwood]

Not in UK English! "can't see the wood for the trees" is the only way I've ever heard the phrase - but it's clear from the comments that this is a real regional thing, which is super interesting. As liv says above, "wood" is the standard English term for a smallish area of trees, and "woods" seems to be more of an Americanism.

[lilacsigil]

Usually but not always "forest" in Australia, too! Even though we usually only use "forest" with other terms, like "forest plantation", or "forestry management" or "rainforest" otherwise it's "the bush".

[liv]

I didn't consciously know this, so thank you for commenting! Really good point that forest in Australian English is preserved in compound phrases.

[silveradept]

Another USian, and in both regions I have lived in (Great Lakes Flatlander and Evergreen Liberal Snob), the phrase is usually delivered "can't see the forest for the trees", since "the wood" or "the woods" has become a count noun for some group of trees that isn't big enough to be a forest but bigger than a small grouping of trees.

[fluffymark]

I grew up on the edge of the Forest of Bowland, which covers most of the north of Lancashire. This forest has NO trees, it is all barren moorland. The traditional meaning of the word "Forest" in UK English means Royal hunting ground, nothing at all to do with trees, and the Forest of Bowland is an example in current use of this traditional meaning of the word.

As opposed to the word "Wood" which refers to an area of trees as well as what trees are made of, but in either case it refers to trees.

Nowadays the meaning of the word Forest has evolved and now normally refers to a large area of trees.

If non-UK English doesn't have the traditional meaning of Forest, maybe that explains the different wording of the expression?

[liv]

Ooh, nice to see you, I didn't know you were still here. And thank you, this is a great example of the older meaning of forest!

[ewx]

“I can’t see the fog for ‘fog’.”

[liv]

That is indeed hilarious, thanks for pointing to it.