🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <42mubv$d82@cliff.island.net>, jthorpe@island.net writes:
|> I've been casually reading this line since it started
|> and it's taken me until this morning to realise that
|> the discussion on the difference in meanings between
|> wood, woods, forest etc., misses the point.
|> 
|> The wood in this expression is the material that the trees 
|> comprise.  

Well, if you'd followed the thread a little more closely, you would have
seen that several posters have already explained that the wood, in this
expression, is a forest, a usage common in Britain. In fact, it was
not until this thread was started did I realize that that particular 
usage is uncommon in the U.S. Somehow, when Macbeth (a character in a
play by that name by the late W. Shakespeare), says something about
Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane, it does not conjure up a vision of a 
stack (a bundle?) of marching four-by-fours.
Also, the same expression exists in Dutch and German, where such
confusion does not arise. I don't know about Chinese.

Daan Sandee                                           sandee@think.com
Cambridge, MA 02142