What do you mean when you say you can separate the wheat from the shaft? ?

Question

What do you mean when you say you can separate the wheat from the shaft? ?

Answer 1

The expression is "To separate the wheat form the chaff."

Wheat is the fruit of the plant, but each kernel of wheat is surrounded by an inedible covering called chaff.  To use the wheat, the chaff must be separated out.  The wheat is the useful part; the chaff is the useless part.

Answer 2

The wheat ears (the grain) are what you are harvesting, the chaff is the part of the plant which you don't want.

Answer 3

Try: "Separate the wheat from the chaff."

Answer 4

The saying is to separate the wheat from the chaff  which means to sort out the relevant or wanted stuff from the unwanted stuff or the rubbish or unnecessary facts.

It originally probably was used by people threshing or harvesting grain the wheat was separated from the straw -  the part of the wheat plant that the grain grew on and was not important once harvested - hence the expression was used to explain how it was important to sort out the important stuff from the less important stuff

here is also a website that gives a bit more into the explanation  

Answer 5

When you separate the wheat from the chaff, you select what is useful or valuable and reject what is useless or worthless.



  

Answer 6

I heard this adage said as separating wheat from chaff. Chaff is the outer part of grain such as wheat. It has to be removed before the grain can be used as food.

When you separate the wheat from the chaff, you decide which people or things in a group are good or important and which are bad or unimportant.

ex..Another problem is sorting the wheat from the chaff as a huge amount of information floods in.

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Answer 7

Separate the important information (wheat) from the filler (chaff).  It is a phrase typically used to indicate the ability to get at what the more important or significant issue, problem, fact is apart from all the rest of the information that is there but maybe insignificant.

Answer 8

To separate the wheat from the chaff is to cull what is valuable from the whole and disregard the useless other. I think its biblical meaning is to get to the heart, the truth of things and disgard the trifles that distract from that  nub of truth.

the way of separating wheat and chaff was called winnowing and to do it was to throw the wheat in the air; the wheat kernel would fall to earth while the chaff would be blown away on the wind.