Englishfine kettle of fish
Meaning: A terrible mess.
Example: “The car won't start, and it's pouring rain: this is a fine kettle of fish.”
Equivalents in other languages
German: Da haben wir den Salat Literally: There we have the salad
Swedish: Nu är det kokta fläsket stekt Literally: Now the boiled pork is fried
Afrikaans: Nou is die gort gaar Literally: Now the barley porridge is cooked
Origin: A kettle of fish was once a real social occasion. Along the Scottish borders and the salmon rivers of northern Britain, an eighteenth-century riverside party involved catching salmon and boiling them on the spot in a large kettle over an open fire, with guests eating from the pot — a genuinely enjoyable event, but a hot, crowded, awkward one, conducted outdoors around scalding water with no proper table. That combination of festivity and disorder is the likeliest route to the modern sense of a confused mess. A competing suggestion derives "kettle" from "kiddle," a fish weir or trap set in a river, where a tangled catch would produce a comparable muddle. The "fine" and "pretty" that usually precede the phrase are entirely ironic.
More English idioms
- get someone's goat To irritate or annoy someone.
- go whole hog To spare nothing; to do something with maximum enthusiasm.
- grin and bear it To accept or endure a bad situation.
- horse around To play a little roughly.
- horse of another color A situation or plan which represents a change from what was expected or assumed.
- horse sense Common sense or practical shrewdness.
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Words that look familiar in another language but mean something else entirely.
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