chaff

be caught with chaff

To be easily fooled or duped. I only listened to that fool because I was caught with chaff back then.
See also: caught, chaff

separate the wheat from the chaff

To separate the good or valuable from that which is inferior. With so many manuscripts arriving daily, it's a challenge to separate the wheat from the chaff and spot the really exceptional ones.
See also: chaff, separate, wheat
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

separate the wheat from the chaff

Prov. to separate what is useful or valuable from what is worthless. When it comes to books, time will separate the wheat from the chaff. Good books will have lasting appeal, and the rest will be forgotten. The managers hoped that the new procedure for evaluating employees would separate the wheat from the chaff.
See also: chaff, separate, wheat
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs.

separate wheat from chaff

Sort the valuable from the worthless, as in I hope we'll get a preview of the auction so we can separate the wheat from the chaff. This idiom alludes to the ancient practice of winnowing grain.
See also: chaff, separate, wheat
The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer.

separate the wheat from the chaff

or

separate the grain from the chaff

If you separate the wheat from the chaff or separate the grain from the chaff, you decide which things or people in a group are good or necessary, and which are not. The first two rounds of the contest separate the wheat from the chaff. Judges should not forget that when you separate the wheat from the chaff, you should try to keep the wheat. Note: You can use sort or sort out instead of separate. It's up to Wilkinson to sort out the wheat from the chaff and get the team back to the top of the table. Note: You can refer to the good or necessary things or people in a group as wheat or grain, and to the others as chaff. There's so little wheat in all this chaff. Was there rather less grain than chaff? Note: `Chaff' refers to the outer covers of wheat or other cereal which are separated from the grain by a process called winnowing. In the Bible (Matthew 3:12; Luke 3:17), John the Baptist uses the image of someone separating the wheat from the chaff to describe how Jesus will separate those who go to heaven from those who go to hell.
See also: chaff, separate, wheat
Collins COBUILD Idioms Dictionary, 3rd ed.

be caught with chaff

be easily deceived.
Chaff is the husks of corn separated from the grain by threshing. Be caught with chaff has been used since the late 15th century as a metaphor for being easily fooled or trapped.
See also: caught, chaff

separate (or sort) the wheat from the chaff

distinguish valuable people or things from worthless ones.
Chaff is the husks of corn or other seed separated out when the grain is winnowed or threshed. The metaphorical contrast between wheat and chaff is drawn in several passages in the Bible, for example in Matthew 3:12: ‘he will thoroughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire’.
See also: chaff, separate, wheat
Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary

sort out/separate the ˌwheat from the ˈchaff

separate people or things of a better quality from those of a lower quality: When all the applications came in, our first task was to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Chaff is the outer covering of the seeds of grain such as wheat, which is separated from the grain before it is used.
See also: chaff, out, separate, sort, wheat
Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary

separate the wheat from the chaff, to

To sort the valuable from the worthless. The analogy here is to the age-old practice of winnowing grain, formerly done by hand and now mechanized. The term persists nevertheless. G. B. McCutcheon used it in Anderson Crow (1920): “They separated the wheat from the chaff.”
See also: separate, wheat
The Dictionary of Clichés by Christine Ammer
See also:
  • be caught with chaff
  • caught
  • be caught with (one's) trousers down
  • caught with one's pants down, be
  • be caught with your pants down
  • be caught with (one's) pants down
  • caught with (one's) pants down
  • with (one's) pants down
  • with pants down
  • bang to rights
References in periodicals archive
a chaff points, while a mixing encapsulation result will be shown in figure 6.
Cancelable Fingerprint Features Using Chaff Points Encapsulation
This step is repeated until the number of chaff points reaches the required number to fill the matrix with the free area.
A simple fingerprint Fuzzy Vault for FIDO
"The Chaff" ( 260 pages, ISBN# 978-0-9840493-6-3) is available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
Author Joel Chafetz Releases His Novel "The Chaff"
The chaff vectors [cv.sub.j] are generated as follows: [cv.sub.j] = [v.sub.i] + [alpha]*[rv.sub.j], where, [v.sub.i] is genuine vector, and [rv.sub.j] is a random vector; each element in [rv.sub.j] is independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) according to standard norm distribution N(0, 1).
A hybrid approach to protect palmprint templates
Biochars generated from rice chaff and straws of canola, wheat, and rice had relatively higher content of the carboxylic group, while biochars from legume straws of faba bean, pea, and mungbean had relatively lower content.
Effects of biochars generated from crop residues on chemical properties of acid soils from tropical and subtropical China
Also most indirect effects by fertile tillers on chaff Weight were applied.
Correlation analysis and path analysis for yield and its components in hulless barley
He writes "I think there is a direct correlation between our physical location within the galaxy and our 'spiritual rank' as beings....Did God in his infinite wisdom place us in direct proportion to our spiritual worth a specific distance from the center of the galaxy knowing the mathematical balance between our scientific evolution and our spiritual growth?" Some questions and answers proposed by Threshing the Cosmic Chaff seem equivalent to the inane question of how many angels can dance on the head or point of a pin (a theological puzzle that scholars often mistakenly associate with the works of Aquinas).
Threshing the Cosmic Chaff: The Reckoning of a Degenerate World
Once in a while, a kind-hearted farmer felt sorry for this pile of chaff that crawled down from the hot tin at chore time.
Running the blower: a farm boy's start on the threshing ring
But the problem with existing fiberglass chaff is that it is too big and too easy to detect, asserts Gassman.
'Smart Chaff' being developed to thwart surface-to-air missiles
The chaff had reignited, becoming a 6-inch flame that melted the tote!
Oops, whoops & outright blunders: where there's smoke, there's fire.--German Proverb
The nature center boasts not only passive solar and geothermal technology, but its classrooms feature bio-composite cabinets that incorporate locally derived wheat chaff, crushed sunflower seeds and compressed newspapers.
Stewardship and recreation: is this a marriage made in Utah?
Computers cannot flush the semantic, or meaningful, from the binary chaff, Behrendt said.
Wheat From Chaff
The consequence is that companies not strictly policing the process keep altogether too many "records," and they can't easily distinguish wheat from chaff when they must go to court.
Data duty: federal courts insist companies police their recordkeeping
That's why he--or she--needs to have a liberal education, so all this whirlwind of a little wheat and a lot of chaff that is the news won't be novel to him.
Parting editorial wheat from chaff: readers need insights from editorial writers, not just a mirror of their own mercurial whims
Mechanics, maintenance on the M130 chaff dispenser shouldn't turn into a job for the AVIM shop.
A little less tightening