An old One Big Happy strip in my comics feed today — posted here on 3/28/14 in “OBH roundup”, but with little comment — in which Ruthie reveals her aide-memoire for the name of a fish her mother sometimes cooks for dinner:
(#1) buncher, crowder? — or flocker, packer, ganger, batcher, schooler? — but actually grouper
At this point, you’re probably thinking that groupers are so called because they travel in schools, that is, in a kind of group. But no; there’s an etymological surprise here.
From NOAD:
noun grouper: a large or very large heavy-bodied fish of the sea bass family, with a big head and wide mouth, found in warm seas. (Family Serranidae: several genera, in particular Epinephelus and Mycteroperca. The Nassau grouper (E. striatus) is the most economically important fish of the Bahamas.) ORIGIN: early 17th century: from Portuguese garoupa, probably from a local term in South America.
No doubt English group played a role in the reshaping of the Portuguese garopa to grouper, but it’s not the source of the fish’s common name.
From the Wikipedia entry on groupers (which is worth taking a look at; these fish are fascinating — some are huge, they suck in their prey like vacuum cleaners, so they have teeth in their throat, and most of them do the sex-change thing, starting life as female and switching to male when males are needed), this illustration:
(#2) A gag grouper. Mycteroperca microlepis, in the National Aquarium in Baltimore MD
A well-chosen example for our purposes, because the gag grouper is known as an excellent table fish — and is farm-fished, so is sustainable food (as well as a challenge for sport-fishers); in any case, it might be the very grouper Ruthie’s mother is cooking for dinner.
The gag grouper has its own Wikipedia page (also fascinating), which does not, however, explain the gag in the name. Indeed, a number of web sites extol the qualities of the gag, as they refer to it, while griping about what a terrible name gag is for this splendid fish. It seems that gag is not a beheading of the compound gag grouper, but a (South Atlantic and Caribbean) local name for the species, so that gag grouper is a species-genus compound, like collie dog, cardinal bird, spanakopita pie, matzo bread, or phyllo dough. The question is then: where does the local name gag come from?
Everyone appears to recognize that the straightforward sources have nothing to recommend them; from NOAD, these are:
noun gag-1. 1. [a] a piece of cloth put in or over a person’s mouth to prevent them from speaking or crying out: they tied him up and put a gag in his mouth. … noun gag-2. a joke or an amusing story or scene, especially one forming part of a comedian’s act or in a film or play: films that goad audiences into laughing at the most tasteless of gags.
The OED is as baffled as the rest of us: of unknown origin. At least the OED has cites, the first of them from 1884:
There appear to be .. at Key West, as well as in Bermuda, various local forms closely related to this [sc. the rock-fish], one of which is known by the name ‘Gag’. G. B. Goode in G. B. Goode et al., Fisheries U.S.: Section I 413
No, I don’t think you should be concocting stories about fish-related guys in Key West nicknamed Gag (for Gagarin, Gagney, Gagnon, Gagosian, or whatever).
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