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]

Oh, yes, I *like* the ambiguity and certainly, no poll without it. Just wanted to highlight a possible regional...something.

[melannen]

I wonder if it's a UK vs. US thing; I know there's differences in the meanings of words like "forest" and "wood" in general across the pond. (Which is actually super-fascinating in terms of the land use history and the mythmaking around it in the two countries!)

[ewt]

In Canada I heard both "forest" and "wood" with "forest" significantly more; in the UK I have mostly heard "wood" but "wood" here definitely seems to mean "forest" much more strongly than it does in North America.

[steorra]

Hm, this Canadian doesn't recall hearing the saying with "wood".

[ewt]

I moved a lot and have some pretty recent British ancestry. Annoyingly, I can't figure out if "wood" was a thing I heard in New Brunswick but not in the prairies, or if it was a thing I heard from my mother but not other adults.

Certainly I was aware from a young age that "wood" could mean "a place with lots of trees in it" because I knew that Winnie the Pooh lived in the Hundred Acre Wood. (I didn't know what acres were until rather later.)

[steorra]

I'm from BC, so it could totally be regional within Canada.

[liv]

Thank you for offering your experience as someone who's lived in two countries with quite different Englishes. I don't think I'd heard "forest" at all before today, so I assumed it was a mistake.

[siderea]

First time I ever heard it not forest was this poll.

(New Englander, with 1980s sojourn in Northern California.)

[rosefox]

Ditto. Grew up in NYC, one American parent, one British parent.

[genarti]

Same here!

(US, from Ohio and New England; we had a lot of British family friends when I was growing up, but I can't recall ever hearing them use this idiom to know which variant they night have used.)

I do agree that if I were to say "wood," I'd actually say "woods" -- but really it's such a fixed expression to me that it'd feel weird to not just say forest. I had no idea this was a regionalism!

[rushthatspeaks]

+1.

[mrissa]

Same.

[azurelunatic]

Ditto.

I have heard "wood" meaning the collection of trees, but never in this saying.

[sciatrix]

US person, and I've always heard forest. Actually, if I was to use this version, I would specifically say "can't see the woods for the trees." In this context, using the singular "a wood" to me connotates a sort of poetic usage, not an everyday aphoristic "those woods right there" sort.

[liv]

That's really fascinating because woods, plural, sounds poetic to me. I think of The woods are lovely, dark and deep – by an American poet, or Teddy Bears' picnic – an American song. Or idioms like we're not out of the woods yet. A wood, singular, is just that group of trees over there that isn't big enough to be referred to as a forest.

[melannen]

It really does seem to be a true dialect difference!

I think of "forest" as connoting, in addition to "a bunch of trees together" also something along the lines of "untamed/unmanaged wilderness" - which of course it generally isn't, even out West, it's either managed or abandoned but previously cultivated/managed, but it's part of the national myth that it is.

"The woods" actually seems less poetic, and also, like, smaller? It could just mean the same thing as "forest" but I wouldn't call, for example, the half-acre of unmanaged trees at the back of a park a "forest", but I might call it "the woods", like, "I think a bobcat lives in the woods down by the crick" or something, whereas the woods down by the crick are not nearly majestic enough to rate "forest".

"Wood" singular to mean "group of trees" is either deliberately poetic/archaic/British, or very rarely it's short for "woodlot" and is definitely heavily managed.

[liv]

Yeah, I agree, wood is smaller and less wild than forest. But I had no idea until this post that there's a dialect difference between wood and woods!

You're right about myths too, of course. Plenty of apparently vast wilderness forests that are actually managed, or at least were managed for several centuries even if they've been left alone more recently. And plenty of cute little woodland groves that are actually the remnants of really quite ancient and mostly natural ecosystems. But the connotations of the words are that forest is grand and wild, and wood is local and domestic.

[rushthatspeaks]

Dialectically (Midwestern U.S. now living in northeastern U.S.), where I was growing up a forest specifically means something thick enough that you can't see into it more than a foot or so because of undergrowth, overgrowth, closeness of trees, and so on. Anything else was woods. 'Wood' does not exist as a term in that area and I initially learned the variant through poetry.

[liv]

I think I learned woods plural through American poetry, mostly Robert Frost, so it works both ways. I don't have a specific cut-off that makes a landscape a forest rather than a wood, but I agree that a forest is bigger in both density and extent.

Wood v. Woods

[(Anonymous)]

I have never known the idiom as "Not out of the woods." For me, the only usage for this phrase is the singular tense.

Southernwood