nonfish
English edit
Etymology edit
Adjective edit
nonfish (not comparable)
- Not fish, or not relating to fish.
- nonfish meats
- 1996, S. Opitz, Trophic Interaction in Caribbean Coral Reefs:
- For the construction of nonfish groups one should, as was done for fishes, start from the species level[.]
Hypernyms edit
Noun edit
nonfish (plural nonfishes or nonfish)
- That which is not a fish.
Usage notes edit
The English word meat in its main modern sense, referring to the flesh of animals used as food, has tended over the centuries to be idiomatically restricted to, and thus to implicitly denote, nonfish animals, such that disjunctive mentions of meat versus fish, or not meat but rather fish, are common (see meat § Usage notes). Nonetheless, natural language is flexible enough in its variable semantic ontology that the word meat can be extended to comprise fish flesh when a collocation specifies it, such as all meats including fish or meats of both fish and nonfish origin. The desire to restrict the word meat to its nonfish-only sense is a factor that sometimes helps to drive the use of a hypernym, such as protein or proteins, instead, and such hypernymous use can be still more useful once all protein-rich foods, even nonanimal foods (such as nuts or dairy foods or plant-based meat substitutes) are included in a discussion.