Fish story

Reader question:

Please explain this sentence and “fish story” in particular: If you think this is just another fish story, contact us for more information and a demonstration.

My comments:

If you don’t believe this is true, come to us and we’ll show you how to do it.

In other words, this is not just another fish story, it’s true.

Fish story is a story that sounds, er, fishy, suspicious, unbelievable, far-fetched, incredible, exaggerated.

In short, untrue.

Fish stories are originally tales told by fishermen, about what a big fish they “almost caught”. Professional fishermen, and amateur anglers also, are wont to do that. Even though all they’ve got in the net are finger-sized fish, they tend to brag instead about what a big fish it was that they let off the hook, one with a head looking “bigger than the front of my boat!”

Or they’ll talk about the killer shark that threatened to attack them, its head “the size of a house”.

Anyways, fish story or fish tale has been an American idiom since 1819 (Merriam-Webster.com).

Here are examples from the Web:

1. fish story:

The Psychology in the Fiction

As one reads Moby-Dick with an eye to the parables within, one is struck time and again with the images of pride, madness, revenge, humor, and others too numerous to mention. A paper as short as this can only emphasize to the reader that every chapter is replete with secondary meaning. If you read Moby-Dick and imagine into it from an altitude of 50,000 feet, one point is obvious: Almost every chapter stands on its own as a source of insight into Psyche. The warp and weave of the story has recurring themes such as this one of madness we have taken on. Read it a second time and a new theme appears. But all of this is true only if the reader comes to the story with imaginal reality in mind. As was said earlier, without imaginal reality imposed upon Moby-Dick, it is just another fish story.

In the consulting room, the therapist is faced with a choice: imagine into the narrative the client relates or simply listen to the story as story. Therapy is collaborative healing. The client tells the story while the therapist becomes the catalyst to create the imaginal reality, to bring Psyche into the room. With Psyche present, both client and therapist can move to this perch of 50,000 feet to observe the warp and weave of the client’s narrative. Insight and healing can occur when both can sense the construction of the fabric, the story told.

Jung has said that,

“In general, it is the non-psychological novel that offers the richest opportunities for psychological elucidation. Here the author, having no intentions of this sort, does not show his characters in a psychological light and thus leaves room for analysis and interpretation, or even invites it by his unprejudiced mode of presentation.”

Moby-Dick is such.

- Imaginal Reality: Madness in the Ordinary, By Stephan A. George, Findingstone.com.

2. fish tale:

The natural world is rife with humbug and fish tales, of things not being what they seem. Harmless viceroy butterflies mimic toxic monarch butterflies, parent birds draw predators away from the nest by feigning a broken wing, angler fish lure prey with appendages that wiggle like worms.

Biologists distinguish between such cases of innate or automatic deception, however, and so-called tactical deception, the use of a normal behavior in a novel situation, with the express purpose of misleading an observer. Tactical deception requires considerable behavioral suppleness, which is why it’s most often observed in the brainiest animals.

Great apes, for example, make great fakers. Frans B. M. de Waal, a professor at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Emory University, said chimpanzees or orangutans in captivity sometimes tried to lure human strangers over to their enclosure by holding out a piece of straw while putting on their friendliest face.

“People think, Oh, he likes me, and they approach,” Dr. de Waal said. “And before you know it, the ape has grabbed their ankle and is closing in for the bite. It’s a very dangerous situation.”

Apes wouldn’t try this on their own kind. “They know each other too well to get away with it,” Dr. de Waal said. “Holding out a straw with a sweet face is such a cheap trick, only a naïve human would fall for it.”

- A Highly Evolved Propensity for Deceit, The New York Times, December 22, 2008.