Attributing misguided actions or assumptions to someone is to say they’re “barking up the wrong tree.” This idiom is perfect for describing situations where someone’s efforts are really misdirected. That’s especially the case when, what a person is doing really seems like a lot of unnecessary fuss and bother and doesn’t seem to have a chance of solving anything. The effort involved in “barking up the wrong tree” seems to be done in the face of or in willful disregard of common sense.
Origin of “Barking Up the Wrong Tree”
The idiom originated from American hunting practices of the 19th century. It probably came from the behavior of hunting dogs, especially those used in the “treeing” of such game as raccoons. These dogs would chase the animal until it had no choice but to climb a tree. They would then inform the human hunters of the animal’s location by barking and would not stop barking until the hunters arrived. On occasion, however, the dogs would direct their human partners to the wrong tree. And this mistake would cause the humans to think they were pursuing the wrong animal.
The idiom’s first appearances in print can be traced back to the early 1800s. One of the best-known uses of it was by Davy Crockett, an American frontiersman, soldier, and politician. He wrote in 1833, “This was all a humbug—his advice to me was all in my eye and Betty Martin, and I might have barked up the wrong tree many a long day before I would have got any help from him.” Considering the context of this reference, we see a clear connection of the idiom with hunting traditions in American frontier life.
The Shakespeare Connection
“Barking up the wrong tree” comes from the 19th-century practice of hunting with dogs. Yet, we can lay claim to a part of its popularity making its rounds today due to the idiomatic expressions found in the works of Shakespeare. After all, “barking up the wrong tree” is the kind of phrase that’s not only amusing but also has a certain zesty odor to it that helps it stick in the collective memory of the English speaker. Shakespeare undoubtedly had a hand in imparting such phrases with a zest that helps them go down, go around, and go to work in pop culture.
The connection that exists between Shakespeare and the expression “barking up the wrong tree” is representative of both Shakespeare and the expression employing animal antics in their various uses of forms of figurative language. Shakespeare, an author who frequently and with great aplomb snuck animals and their various forms of misbehavior into his metaphors and similes, is one half of this duo. On the other half is an expression that talks about hunting dogs and describes a form of human error. In some ways, both halves embody the use of animals and their behaviors as a kind of English idiom.
Shakespeare’s effect, apart from being gigantic, was somewhat comparable to that of a language scholar: he helped to shape the everyday speech of his era and long after. He drove the language toward sounds and structures that let imagery riff on common experiences—with the altogether American experience of hunting being one possibility. His use of imagery, which was one of his prodigious talents, allowed him, across his body of work, to name kinds of ways to illustrate for his audience the sort of image to carry when contemplating a specific character or deed.
“Barking up the Wrong Tree” in Popular Culture
Throughout the media, including popular music, one can find the idiom “barking up the wrong tree.”
A good example is found in the song “Barking Up the Wrong Tree,” from the 1989 album “Cosmic Thing” by The B-52’s. In it, lead singer Kate Pierson describes a situation in which someone’s romantic efforts are simply misdirected. Another example can be found in the Mike Posner song “Barking Up the Wrong Tree,” in which the singer-songwriter talks about misguided pursuits in both life and love. Both of these songs illustrate the common use of the idiom in conjunction with love and personal relationships — and the somewhat depressing themes of human misdirection and romance gone wrong.
The idiom occurs often in movies. For example, in “The Avengers,” when the character Iron Man tells the villain Loki that he is “barking up the wrong tree,” it implies that Loki’s grand plan—in a nutshell, trying to take over Earth and rule it—is just fundamentally wrong. Similar characters use the idiom in “Legally Blonde” to mean, well, it just feels like a bad guess. Both characters use it with a sense of reason and a little confidence—kind of as if, outside of not being an old saw, it should be a clue in a crossword puzzle. And in both cases, it carries a slightly more humorous tone than seems to be indicated by the situations that either character is in. I would say that using the expression in those two cases gives those two characters a likeability that carries into and throughout the film.
Several well-known television shows have employed this idiom. For example, one of the characters on “The Simpsons” used it when the character was misunderstanding a situation and was about to wrongly accuse another character of something. It’s worth noting that the “I” in the idiom is used to highlight a kind of slangy accusation. In “Friends,” one of the characters narrates a situation in which another character made a series of misinterpretations and was headed in a direction that might be described as “wrong” in terms of a lot of things that are also “wrong” in terms of the laws of nature and the universe.
The classic works of literature also put the idiom to use. In “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” for instance, Mark Twain has Huck say it in the context of describing how a bunch of people is after the wrong man. Huck is trying to reflect on how the people around him are making a bunch of false assumptions. In “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Harper Lee has one of her characters use the idiom when she’s reflecting on a part of the story when two characters are making some really poor judgments and in what turns out to be an unexpected set of circumstances.
Using “Barking up the Wrong Tree”
- After weeks of investigating his coworker for the missing files, James realized he had been barking up the wrong tree when the documents were found in his own desk.
- The detective told the anxious mother that accusing her neighbour of the crime was barking up the wrong tree, as the evidence pointed to someone outside the neighborhood.
- When Sarah blamed her friend for spreading the rumour, she was barking up the wrong tree because it was actually started by someone else entirely.
- Critics who thought the movie would fail at the box office were barking up the wrong tree, as it turned out to be a huge success.
- The team spent hours trying to fix the software bug in the wrong module, only to discover they had been barking up the wrong tree and the issue was in a completely different part of the system.
Barking up the wrong tree?
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