“Fish, and visitors, smell in three days.”
– Ben Franklin
We have a time limit on this thread, folks.
Is it an Americanism? People here don’t add the extra word ‘fish’. It’s just a ‘tuna sandwich’, a ‘can of tuna’ etc.
Yeah - I’ve not heard ‘tuna fish’ in either the UK, NZ or Australia. Perhaps it comes from advertising in the US, which is why it’s more common there?
I see the term “tuna fish” most typically applied to canned (or in modern times, packaged) tuna to distinguish the canned fish from, say, salmon.
The term itself has a certain nice roll off the tongue so that it becomes easy to say even when it’s clearly redundant.
Tuna is cactus fruit that has been eaten by people in the southwestern USA and Mexico for a long time. I’m sure the addition of the word fish by English speakers was to make sure it was clear they meant the fish and not the fruit. Where would this use of the additional word fish spread from? It would spread from the regions that had Spanish and English speakers. Tuna or Prickly Pear is grown commercially for market like we grow apples in the the northern USA. There is a large enough area of the mixing of cultures to require that distinction of fish after Tuna in common speech.
Of course you can can tuna fish. How do you think[canned tuna](canned tuna) is produced? Tuna canneries can tuna.
:eek:
Next you’ll be telling me that you don’t know all the Bee Gees albums, either.
Except that gefilte fish isn’t stuffed.
I doubt it. The use of names like “tunny fish”, German “Thunfisch”, Swedish “Tonfisk”, etc., by speakers of Germanic languages to refer to the fish Thunnus thynnus appears to have been common long before English speakers in general knew that there was such a thing as the tuna cactus.
The substitution of the word “tuna” in English for its more traditional synonym “tunny” does seem to have been influenced by Spanish-American usage, but that didn’t happen till the late 19th century, centuries after the appearance of “tunny fish” and its cognates in Germanic languages.
Dolphin fish.
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There is nothing wrong with redundancy in language. In fact, it’s an important component, not a flaw.
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“Tuna fish” was just how people decided to use the term. It’s likely that, when it was first being served, people didn’t know what “tuna” was (it looks like canned tuna is just over 100 years old). So when restaurants first served it (and groceries first stocked it), they called it “tuna fish” to give their patrons an idea of what it was they were serving.
It would be an important distinction if you were visiting the hill of the elves in Aman.
You skin and debone the fish, then grind it, mix it with flour or breadcrumbs, and then stuff it back in the skin.
I’ve heard flounder fish.
Mahi Mahi: talk about redundancy.
As a matter of usage, the aquatic vertebrate is a tuna (no fish); its flesh, usually canned but sometimes served as a steak, is ‘tuna fish’ – much like the distinction between pig and pork, or between cattle and beef.
Surely not true. “Tuna fish” was commonly used in New York in the 1950s when I was growing up. We had absolutely no idea that the cactus fruit existed, much less what it was called. I remember seeing some for sale for the first time in a supermarket in the late 1960s or early 1970s, when it was labeled “prickly pear fruit,” not “tuna.” Tuna fish was used long before there was any need to make the distinction; and when it was, the distinction was made by calling the fruit something else.
It can’t be true because you never knew something existed is not true.
The fruit and name has been around for centuries. The need for a distinction would have been generated in the southwest and moved out from there. Only one person selling the stuff canned would have needed to see a reason to add the word fish to the can for distinction and it would have spread.
I’m saying it’s a viable reason for the usage and nobody has proven it’s not. It should be considered if someone looks for the origin.
er…tuna mammal?
Even if there were the need for a distinction in the southwest, there is no reason for it to have spread to areas, such as New York or most of the rest of the country where no distinction was necessary. Your explanation is pure speculation, without a shred of evidence in its favor and contradicted by the usage of the word in New York in the 1950s. You’re going to have to provide some kind of cite for it to be considered remotely credible.