The wheat from the chaff_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

The wheat from the chaff

And we can do something about that, can’t we?

Alas, the truth is, we can’t.

Because doing so requires effort, both physically and in spirit. Yet to break out of the old cocoon is not easy - especially not easy for us humans^_^. It’s challenging, uncomfortable, often risky. And most of us have become lazy anyway, and very much like to go with the flow and roll with the punches.

Over time and by habit, we’re no longer able to think for ourselves and are fine with it, unwilling to make any attempt at change.

The long and short of it is, we now hear things from the radio, television and the mainstream media in general but we can’t tell the difference between right and wrong, truth and trash.

Or as the speaker puts it, we can’t “distinguish the wheat from the chaff”.

Chaff is the outer protective casing of a grain of wheat. Chaff is inedible and therefore farmers always have to remove the chaff from the wheat by threshing before eating the sweat wheat.

It is this practice that gave rise to the idiom “distinguish the wheat from the chaff” – or the more commonplace “separate the wheat from the chaff”.

Metaphorically speaking, the wheat represents anything that’s good whereas the chaff represents the bad.

Here are two examples, both from The Economist magazine:

1. THERE are few divisions of the book industry with a worse reputation than business publishing. Hundreds if not thousands of business books come out every year, all with glowing press releases and effervescent puffs. Literary editors tend to consign them straight to the bin.