{"id":2770,"date":"1998-12-14T00:00:00","date_gmt":"1998-12-14T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/1998\/12\/14\/xxmas-comments\/"},"modified":"2018-01-14T21:58:28","modified_gmt":"2018-01-15T05:58:28","slug":"xxmas-comments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/1998\/12\/14\/xxmas-comments\/","title":{"rendered":"XX: Go Fish (Reader Comments and Addenda)"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n\r\n<p>Jacob Mattison suggests that the fish symbol derives from the loaves-and-fishes story recounted in <a href=\"http:\/\/bible.gospelcom.net\/cgi-bin\/bible?language=English&amp;version=RSV&amp;passage=john+6&amp;search=&amp;showxref=yep&amp;showfn=yep\">John 6<\/a>. (I guess a loaf was too hard to draw.) He points out a couple of other New Testament mentions of fish: eating fish after the resurrection (<a href=\"http:\/\/bible.gospelcom.net\/cgi-bin\/bible?language=English&amp;version=RSV&amp;passage=john+21&amp;search=&amp;showxref=yep&amp;showfn=yep\">John 21<\/a>), and Jesus telling Peter to catch a fish to pay taxes (<a href=\"http:\/\/bible.gospelcom.net\/cgi-bin\/bible?language=English&amp;version=RSV&amp;passage=matthew+17:24-27&amp;search=&amp;showxref=yep&amp;showfn=yep\">Matthew 17:24-27<\/a>). He adds: \"So I had thought that the fish symbol came from the fish stories (you should have seen the one that got away!) and the acronym came after.\" Could be. Finally, he mentions a fish symbol I'd forgotten: one with tentacles, labeled \"Cthulhu.\"<\/p>\r\n<p>Fran and Ed provide an interesting sidelight on fish, quoting Martin R. Vincent's <cite>New Testament Word Studies<\/cite>: apparently one of the words used to refer to fish actually refers to \"anything that is eaten with bread.\" Vincent adds, \"Fish became among the Greeks a chief dainty to gourmands, so that Demosthenes describes a glutton and spendthrift as one who is extravagant in fish.\"<\/p>\r\n<hr \/>\r\n<p>(Last updated: 10 January 1999)<\/p>\r\n<hr \/>\r\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/1998\/12\/13\/xxmas\/\">Back to column XX<\/a><\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-4-uuppercase-2"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2770"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2770\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3419,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2770\/revisions\/3419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}