Break A Leg - I think you'll follow me on this one. In what culture or time period was it considered good luck to break your leg? In English it may have come to mean having good luck but when I studied Chinese I discovered that it originally meant to have something bad happen to save you from a worse fate. The story goes that the Emperor of China called for all the most prominent families to send their oldest sons to fight in a great battle. The head of one of the families was extremely sad because he only had one son. If his son were to fight and die he would have no heir. The son had an accident while riding his horse and broke his leg badly therefore he was exempt from military service. The father considered this a blessing because his lineage would survive. So there you go.
Bark Up The Wrong Tree – Barking up the wrong tree refers to hunting with dogs. If the dogs catch the scent of a nearby animal that is up a tree they have the tendency to get confused sometimes and bark around a tree that has no game in it. If you look all in that tree and find nothing you're not looking where you should be. You're barking up the wrong tree. This idiom confuses me because of its ambiguous language. With the word “tree” in the same sentence as the word “bark” I tend to conjure in my mind the mental image of the bark of a tree. Specifically something like the bark of a maple tree surrounding an oak tree. Why? Because that's bark up the wrong tree.
Beat Around The Bush – Yet another hunting term. This time it involves hunting game that hides in bushes. You send a helper to run the animal out of the bush and then hunt it when you can see it. Beat around the bush has come to mean not getting to the point in conversation. This confuses me because you beat around a bush to help a hunter catch his prey faster. So, beating around the bush should mean getting to the point quickly, right? Taking a long time to get to the point of a conversation should be called waiting outside the bush without help.