A crayfish is neither etymologically nor biologically a fish.
Once when my youngest son was five years old, the two of us were exploring the creek that ran behind our house. Kevin spotted some quick movement in the waters, and pointed. “That’s a crawdad,” I explained, using the colloquial word for crayfish, since it kinda seemed like a colloquial sort of father-son moment.
Kevin watched the “crawdad” a bit until we colloquially began splashing about a bit, skipped some rocks, rested on the bank. A few quiet minutes later, Kevin shot a pointy-finger at movement near the edge of a small sandbar. “Look! Crawldad!”
Overcome by cute, I didn’t explain to him that there is no crawl in crawdad. Nor did I explain (to him or to myself) that there’s also no craw, and certainly no dad, in crawdad or crawfish (as it’s often called in the States) 45 , just as there’s no fish in crawfish/crayfish. All those syllables are mistakes—understandable mistakes, but mistakes nonetheless.
Based purely on appearances (both of the word and of the creature itself), the analogy of crayfish to fish could be understandable. Watery denizens might be termed fish in aggregate, the way the word deer once referred to all animals. But that’s not in any form the case. As I said, it’s all a mistake.
The word for one of the smallest of crustaceans crawldadded over the English channel from Old France (where they spoke Old French, though they didn’t consider it “old” at the time) as crevice, and was adapted into Middle English with a couple of spellings, including crevisse. Two points to consider about crevisse: one, it was originally accented on the second syllable as it was in Old French, which led to variant English pronunciations of the first syllable, including a broadened pronunciation of the long-A sound into “craw.” Two, visse was confused with the Middle English word vish or viss—“fish”—confusion that led to the modern spelling of the word crayfish.
So where does dad come into the story? I’m Kevin’s Dad,
r 46
of course.
« I love this quote found in a web forum, attributed to Herb Stahlke: “I ate crawdads, not crawfish, when I lived in Georgia. Anything else would stick in the cray.”
46 For the “dad” discussion, let me turn the lectern over to The Natchez Naturalist Newsletter: "... it seems to arise from the general impulse among Southern country people to be colorful and folksy with their language. Maybe it has something to do with what the crawdad looks like when he’s in his burrow looking up at you with his claws ready, like a grumpy old man at his front door.” What did I tell you? The dad in crawdad is grumpy me.
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Bill Brohaugh