I guess most here know this one. Does its meaning stem from some American colonial times? It must be more rare than I thought as I did find any information.
As far as I know it essentially means to cull, or select the good/useful parts from the whole.
In German there's the self-explanatory 'die Spreu vom Weizen trennen' (to separate the wheat from the chaff), but the idiom isn't as clear cut in English. Sorry, belligerentyouth, but "separate the English from the Dutch" doesn't appear to have made it all the way up here to Nieuw Zeeland - maybe that's because there are so many Dutch people in my part of the country!
"Separate the wheat from the chaff", on the other hand, is a very common expression, at least in my experience.
Speaking of separating English from Dutch, that would appear to be getting more difficult to do. The Dutch(?) coffee house Moccona is running an ad here in which the the actor speaks Dutch while her words are translated in subtitles. The interesting thing is that many people I know who speak only English, have commented on how superfluous the subtitles are, that the entire script is quite comprehensible without them.
