A Fish Out of Water

One of the oldest idioms still in common English use. Geoffrey Chaucer used a version of the image in the general prologue to The Canterbury Tales (written 1387-1400), describing a monk outside his monastery as being "like to a fish that is waterless." The more familiar modern wording appears later, in Samuel Purchas's travel writing Pilgrimage (1613): "The Arabians out of the desarts are as Fishes out of the Water." The metaphor has stayed essentially unchanged for over six centuries because the image is so immediately understandable.