My $10 says there will be variants of this catchy phrase. (Help me win this)
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I’mIn my country it’s “you’re barking up the wrong tree”.Hi my country, I’m dad
Same here!
Lol not helping buddy
Welcome to Muphry’s Law!
Here it’s “barking up the wrong tree”
Don’t look for snake tits
If this was a contest that would be the winner.
There’s nothing similar, but “you’re confused between porridge and gruel” comes closest.
Thats means that you are knowledgeable, but ignorant on the finer details that makes the case different. When you’re troubleshooting something, it fits.
What is helpful is if you say what the saying means.
it means you are blaming the wrong thing/person for an issue.
I would also add it could be something more like investigating/searching and not necessarily blaming.
“Looking for apples in an orange tree.”
Your princess is in another castle
In the UK we use your term also ‘You’ve got your wires crossed’
Same in Australia, but we also say OPs version just with mate on the end.
You’re crying over wrong grave.
Similar ones would be:
“You’re standing on the hose” (you’re very close to finding the solution but you just can’t)
“You’re bridling the horse from behind” (You’re looking at the problem the wrong way)
“The other way around it becomes a shoe” (same as above)You’re fighting windmills.
(A reference to Don Quichotte, of course)
The saying is hard to translate to English:
They can’t see the forest behind the tree - that they were stuck on looking at.An other one:
They can’t find the udder between the horns.Can’t see the forest for the trees?
I believe this is Swedish (“ser inte skogen för alla träd”).
An attempt at a alternative translation; “can’t see the forest because of all the trees”. Which means you’re perceiving the wrong part of the situation, and thus missing out on the bigger picture.
It’s also an English expression.
It doesn’t ring the same, at least for me.
I like how you said it’s hard to translate to English, but English has the same saying. The saying must have a common ancestor between our two languages! (Or maybe one is the common ancestor…)
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Thanks, Pipey.
italian has prendere un granchio, lit. meaning, “to catch a crab”.
It indicates a gross mistake, the achievement of a much lower result than hoped for or, more rarely, purchasing something believing it to be of much higher value than it actually is. This expression, among the most common used in Italian to indicate a mistake, has its origins in fishing , particularly sport fishing. If you lower the line into the sea until you reach the seabed and touch the bottom with the hook and the bait, it may happen that a crab bites instead of a fish . As soon as the crustacean is hooked, it immediately begins to struggle violently to free itself from the hook, giving the fisherman the impression that it has instead hooked a large prey. Fishing for a crab with a rod is normally a source of disappointment for the fisherman, since it is a useless prey, which in some cases can even damage the line. The origin of the phrase was born from this disappointment, generated by the expectation of a large fish.
Portuguese has dar murro em ponta de fac, meaning “to punch the tip of a knife”.
- insisting on something that apparently won’t work
- insisting on doing something that always goes wrong
- persist without seeing results
