{"id":16052,"date":"2018-08-23T18:09:38","date_gmt":"2018-08-23T17:09:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=16052"},"modified":"2018-08-23T18:09:38","modified_gmt":"2018-08-23T17:09:38","slug":"not-seeing-the-wood-for-the-trees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=16052","title":{"rendered":"Not seeing the wood for the trees"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Recently a friend asked if there is an idiom in English like <strong>I cannot see the wood for the trees<\/strong>, which refers to hearing. We couldn&#8217;t think of any, but maybe you can.<\/p>\n<p>This expression means that you &#8220;cannot see, understand, or focus on a situation in its entirety due to being preoccupied with minor details&#8221; [<a href=\"https:\/\/idioms.thefreedictionary.com\/can%27t+see+the+wood+for+the+trees\">source<\/a>]. Apparently in North America the equivalent is &#8220;I cannot see the forest for the trees&#8221;. The wood refers to a small forest, rather than the material that comes from trees.<\/p>\n<p><a data-flickr-embed=\"true\" data-header=\"true\" data-footer=\"true\"  href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/omniglot\/29295553520\/in\/album-72157674334257923\/\" title=\"Here be trees!\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/farm9.staticflickr.com\/8751\/29295553520_5048e97877_z.jpg\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" alt=\"Here be trees!\"\/><\/a><script async src=\"\/\/embedr.flickr.com\/assets\/client-code.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>There is an equivalent idiom in Esperanto: <em>Li en arbaro sidas kaj arbojn ne vidas<\/em> (He sits in the forest and doesn&#8217;t see trees).<\/p>\n<p>The equvalent in Italian is <em>avere gli occhi foderati di prociutto<\/em> (to have one&#8217;s eyes lined with ham).<\/p>\n<p>Are there similar idioms in other languages?<\/p>\n<p>In Russian the word for tree is <strong>\u0434\u0435\u0440\u0435\u0432\u043e<\/strong> (derevo), which came up in my Russian lessons today. It is comes from the Proto-Slavic <em>*dervo<\/em> (tree), from Proto-Indo-European <em>*d\u00f3ru<\/em> (tree), which is also the root of the English word tree, and of the Welsh <em>derw<\/em> and the Cornish <em>derow<\/em> (oak trees) [<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/%D0%B4%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%BE\">source<\/a>].<\/p>\n<p><em>The photo is one I took of Ashley Jones Field in Bangor.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recently a friend asked if there is an idiom in English like I cannot see the wood for the trees, which refers to hearing. We couldn&#8217;t think of any, but maybe you can. This expression means that you &#8220;cannot see, understand, or focus on a situation in its entirety due to being preoccupied with minor [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[97,104,105,128,10,52,77,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cornish","category-english","category-esperanto","category-italian","category-language","category-russian","category-welsh","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16052","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16052"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16052\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}