这个短语的字面解释是“(狗)对着错误的树吠”，这是什么意思呢？请看对话：

    A: I am planning to buy a new car, but am 5,000 dollars short.

    B: If you think I can come up with the money, you’re barking up the wrong tree.

    Note: The idiom means to “make the wrong choice, ask the wrong person, follow the wrong course.” The allusion is to hunting dogs barking at the bottom of trees where they mistakenly think their quarry is hiding. The earliest known printed citation is in James Kirke Paulding’s “Westward Ho!” (1832). The phrase must have caught on in the United States quickly after Hall’s book. It appeared in several American newspapers throughout the 1830s. For example, this piece came from the Gettysburg newspaper The Adams Sentinel, March 1834, “General you are barking up the wrong tree this time, for I just see that rackoon jump to the next tree, and before this he is a mile off in the woods.”