About a week ago, a fish bone (despite my spirited efforts, a precise word for the prickly needle-thin bones of a fish escape me) became lodged in my dad's throat. After roughly ten minutes of Googling "fish bone stuck in throat" and considering solutions ranging from going to the emergency room to household remedies, my dad just swallowed some bread. The uncomfortable sensation immediately subsided. I was glad that I had declined the offer of boiled fish. The point (<-play on words) of this story isn't that the inconvenience of Google or the oddity that I couldn't find an English word for "prickly needle-thin fish bone" (in fact, maybe I could name it the fishy bone). The point is that I have never really liked eating fish.
Something about fish just smells "fishy" to me. Whenever I eat a fish I catch, I have always wondered whether or not I am actually eating the worm I used to catch the fish. Looking at a fish flopping around staring at me with transfixed and unblinking eyes and oozing with slime invokes some pity. Consider the show Spongebob Squarepants — even though everything ostensibly takes place under the sea, the protagonists are a sponge (Spongebob) and a starfish (Patrick). The fish are stereotyped as generic and one-dimensional (literally, since they are flat) characters.
It's not surprising that only one fish sandwich exists on a McDonald's menu or that Kentucky Fried Fish is an unmarketable concept. Have you ever tried anchovies, a stereotypically unforgivable topping, on pizza? The delight in eating fish seems to revolve around the challenges in eating the fish in the first place. It's like a sport: after catching the fish and maneuvering around the infinite bones, they're finally exposed for their meat.
