fish


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fish

slang
1. An unintelligent, incompetent, or bumbling person. We thought he was going to really take charge and lead the project in exciting new directions, but he turned out to be a bit of a fish in the end. You fish! How'd you screw this report up so bad?
2. An inept or inexperienced poker player. An allusion to the term "shark," meaning a player who is very skilled and ruthless. He let them get cocky and think he was a fish for the first few hands, before taking them for all they were worth by the end of the night.
3. A newly arrived prison inmate, typically when seen as naïve to prison life. A: "Who's going to show the fresh fish to his cell?" B: "I will. Follow me, bub."
4. rude interjection A substitution for "fuck," used as an exclamation of anger, indignation, irritation, or exasperation. A: "Fish!" B: "What happened?" A: "I dropped my plate and it smashed on the ground!" The motor just burnt out on this mower again! Oh, fish!
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms. © 2022 Farlex, Inc, all rights reserved.

fish

n. a stupid and inept person. (Derogatory.) The guy’s a fish. He can’t do anything right.

fish-fight

n. a fight between females. There’s a “fish-fight” over by the biology building.
McGraw-Hill's Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions Copyright © 2006 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
See:
References in classic literature ?
Raw fish! Shall I ever forget my sensations when I first saw my island beauty devour one.
Thus I ate poee-poee as they did; I walked about in a garb striking for its simplicity; and I reposed on a community of couches; besides doing many other things in conformity with their peculiar habits; but the farthest I ever went in the way of conformity, was on several occasions to regale myself with raw fish. These being remarkably tender, and quite small, the undertaking was not so disagreeable in the main, and after a few trials I positively began to relish them; however, I subjected them to a slight operation with a knife previously to making my repast.
'But, wife,' said the fisherman, 'how can you be king--the fish cannot make you a king?' 'Husband,' said she, 'say no more about it, but go and try!
'Well, what would she have now?' said the fish. 'Alas!' said the poor man, 'my wife wants to be king.' 'Go home,' said the fish; 'she is king already.'
When he had really caught three small fish, and said he had caught six, it used to make him quite jealous to hear a man, whom he knew for a fact had only caught one, going about telling people he had landed two dozen.
So, eventually, he made one final arrangement with himself, which he has religiously held to ever since, and that was to count each fish that he caught as ten, and to assume ten to begin with.
As he pulled each fish out of the net, his mouth watered with the thought of the good dinner coming, and he said:
"Each string was of the value of thirty fish, or forty fish, but the women, who made a string a day, were given two fish each.
In order to convict a man of illegal fishing, it was necessary to catch him in the act with all the evidence of the crime about him--the hooks, the lines, the fish, and the man himself.
"Salters, you pitch your fish in naow at once," he said in the tone of authority.
"Does a big fish ever break the line and get away?" inquired the politician, with respectful interest.
The only bait he could find was a bright red blossom from a flower; but he knew fishes are easy to fool if anything bright attracts their attention, so he decided to try the blossom.
Would it stand to reason, that such a fish should live and be catched in this here little pond of water, where it’s hardly deep enough to drown a man, as you’ll find in the wide ocean, where, as every body knows that is, everybody that has followed the seas, whales and grampuses are to be seen, that are as long as one of the pine- trees on yonder mountain?”
Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me.
In drawing them in he again felt a great weight, so that he thought they were full of fish. But he only found a large basket full of rubbish.