the.com/catfish
a fish that tastes with its whole body and lies with a fake face online.
means A catfish is either a whiskered, bottom-dwelling fish, or a person who creates a fake online persona to deceive someone, especially in a romantic relationship.
from The fish gets its name from the cat-like whiskers (barbels) trailing from its face — plain Germanic 'cat' plus 'fish,' a coinage centuries old. The romantic deception sense is brand new by comparison: it spread after the 2010 documentary 'Catfish' and its MTV spinoff, where one character recounts a fisherman's tale about shipping cod with catfish in the tank to keep them lively and nimble — the catfish as a restless agitator. Whether that tank story is true biology or a tidy fable is debatable, but the metaphor stuck: a catfish is the one who keeps you guessing.
- taste buds
- covered head to tail in over 175,000
- no scales
- naked skin breathes oxygen directly
- whisker radar
- barbels smell prey in pitch darkness
- land crawl
- some species walk between ponds
- giant size
- Mekong specimens hit 600-plus pounds
catfish world record — mekong giant catfish in thailand, 646 pounds caught in 2005
catfishing documentary — 2010 film about online dating deception, launched the term into popular use
channel catfish — most commercially farmed catfish in usa, primarily in mississippi delta region