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Fish out of water

noun

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A person in unfamiliar and often uncomfortable surroundings. idiomatic

    "[I]nto this queer assembly, something of a fish out of water and wholly out of his element, strode Cherry Bim, that redoubtable man."

Etymology

* Earliest recorded uses: "fish out of the water" (1585, Lamentable Complaint of Commonality), "Fishes out of the Water" (1613, Samuel Purchas, Pilgrimage). * Earliest use of metaphor by Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales: Prologue (c. 1405) as "fissh þᵗ is waterlees". Compare also the antonymous French comme un poisson dans l'eau, German wie ein Fisch im Wasser.

See also for "fish out of water"

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