Shooting fish is not so easy
It’s always fun when my co-workers come up with phrases for me to research, and this week my fellow columnist Lisa Hobbs came up with a couple of interesting ones for me.
The first is a phrase I’ve heard all my life to describe an easy task. The phrase is ‘like shooting fish in a barrel.’
As in, ‘Winning the baseball game yesterday was so easy it was like shooting fish in a barrel.’
Now this is one of the phrases I have mentioned in the past that make sense on the face of it. Obviously shooting fish trapped in a barrel would be easy. It’s kind of like the phrase ‘taking candy from a baby.’ I think most of us would agree that the majority of people are inherently interested in finding the easiest way to perform a task. So this phrase has always been in common usage, but despite all my efforts, I could not find a definitive origin for it.
Some felt it might actually have been a sport at one point in time, but there seems to be no record of this. Others speculate it might have come from the practice of storing salted fish in barrels, but that doesn’t make much sense either.
As an interesting aside, the phrase has generated some interest recently, oddly enough, because of the TV show ‘Mythbusters,’ which is known for its penchant for proving whether or not old sayings, urban legends and old wives’ tales are accurate. In one of the show’s episodes the producers decided to find out if it is indeed easy to shoot fish in a barrel.
The Mythbusters crew went to some rather bizarre lengths to prove this. They initially placed a dead fish with a motor in it to simulate swimming and used a 9 mm pistol. Their first shot missed, so they painted the inside of the barrel white and added transparent windows to improve visibility. With these improvements they were actually able to hit the fish.
Hmm, maybe it’s not as easy as everyone thought. At any rate, I must apologize to Lisa since I couldn’t find out when the phrase first came into common usage or a feasible origin, yet. I will keep looking. There must be some reason the phrase has been around for so long.
The other origin Lisa wanted me to look into is the term ‘rubbernecking.’ This word is used to describe how crowds will gather at disaster to view the carnage, or how those who are driving by an automobile accident tend to slow down and peer out their windows in order to view the wreckage.
As in, ‘I couldn’t believe how everyone was rubbernecking and holding up traffic when that semi-trailer wrecked on the Interstate.’
Now, one of the origins I found for this one is really a head-turner, so to speak. According to my research one of the most common legends behind the origin of the term has to do with the king of rock and roll. Apparently there is an old Elvis Presley song called ‘Rubberneckin.’ The lyrics of the song talk about the way young men will strain their necks to observe all the beautiful women in a bar, which he calls rubberneckin’.
In actuality, the term was around long before the ‘King’ was swiveling his hips. And again, it’s simply because the term is descriptive of the action. Watching the way any species, well species with necks anyway, will twist, turn and stretch their necks to get a better view of something interesting or, let’s face it, potentially bloody, you’d think that part of their anatomy was made of rubber.
And it’s also interesting to note that ‘rubber’ originally meant ‘something used to rub.’ It wasn’t until the elastic substance we now know as ‘natural rubber’ came into common use that ‘rubber’ came to be synonymous with ‘elastic’ in popular speech.
Charlie Johnson is news editor of the Standard. He can be reached at 473-2191 or by e-mail at [email protected].