the.com/fishy
The smell of a lie, decades before anyone could prove the chemistry.
means Suspicious or arousing doubt, as if something dishonest is going on beneath the surface.
from Straight from the literal smell and slipperiness of fish — English has long leaned on fish for the dubious and the not-quite-right. The figurative "suspicious" sense of fishy emerged in the 19th century, the nose-test of language: if a story stinks, it's fishy. The slipperiness helps too — "slippery as a fish," hard to pin down, prone to wriggling away from the truth.
- olfactory origin
- Slang for suspicious since the early 1800s
- actual chemistry
- Fish stink comes from trimethylamine breakdown
- human gene
- Some people genetically smell perpetually fishy
- shark sense
- Sharks detect blood at one part per million
lake vostok — antarctic subglacial lake with no fish despite 4km of ice above, discovered 1996
enron scandal — energy company accounting fraud that collapsed in 2001, became synonymous with corporate deception
theranos blood testing — elizabeth holmes' company falsely claimed breakthrough blood tests, convicted of fraud 2022