Good morning, word nerds! Thanks for joining me for another Word Nerd Wednesday.
As I was reading this week, I was reminded of a phrase I haven’t heard in quite some time: a fine kettle of fish. It’s most often heard in this kind of context: “Well, this is a fine kettle of fish you’ve landed us in.” And if you didn’t hear the sarcastic tone to that sentence, please insert it now!
Have you ever heard that phrase? I’m not sure whether it’s a common one in the States, but it basically means you’ve gotten yourself into a messy, awkward, or difficult situation. The question is, why that particular phrase?
The first thing I learned is that kettle isn’t referring to that receptacle you boil water in for your tea or coffee. It’s actually referring to a fish-kettle: a long oval-shaped saucepan used for cooking a whole fish. Personally, I wasn’t aware such a thing existed, but a quick google of “fish kettle” shows they’re still readily available today.
Most explanations for how this particular idiom came about focus on references from the 1700s to the practice of setting up tents or marquees along the river bank and entertaining friends and family by cooking live salmon over a fire. This was called giving “a kettle of fish.” (See, for example, this explanation at Phrases.org.uk)
Those offering this explanation don’t have a definitive answer for how “a kettle of fish” came to mean “a muddle or mess”, but many conjecture that it may refer to the mess of bones, skin, and head left in the kettle once the eating is finished. I’m not convinced, partly because I don’t think the definition of “messy” is meant to be taken quite so literally, but I’ll come back to this in a moment.
First, there’s another explanation which I think is highly plausible. The word kiddle is not in use so much today, but it refers to a net barrier constructed in a river or the sea in order to catch fish. The net result, if you’ll forgive the pun, would be “a kiddle of fish.” It doesn’t take too much imagination to hear how similar this is to “kettle of fish”, and this post at Wordhistories.net shows that the two were conflated often enough that the term kettle-net was referenced under the entry kettle in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.
But, whether a kettle of fish refers to fish cooking in a fish-kettle or fish caught in a kiddle/kettle-net, the question still remains: How did this come to have the negative connotation of “a mess” or “an awkward/difficult situation”? Either catching or cooking a kettle of fish should be a good thing, right?
What if we’re looking at this from the wrong perspective? Catching or cooking a kettle of fish is great if you’re human. But what if you’re a fish?
That puts a whole different spin on it, doesn’t it?
If you’re a fish and you’ve just landed in either a fish-kettle or a net, you’re in spot of bother—exactly the kind of situation this idiom refers to. We’re familiar with expressions like “Out of the frying pan, into the fire”, despite the fact that not many of us have ever had first-hand experience of being in a frying pan (I hope!). Then there’s the expression “to be in hot water”, meaning to be in some kind of trouble. It’s not that much of a stretch to think that the phrase kettle of fish didn’t refer to having a kettle of fish so much as being in a kettle of fish.
What do you think? And while you’re at it, I’d love to know if you’ve heard or used this phrase before.
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