Bigger Fish to Fry
Where did "bigger fish to fry" actually come from — and does it even hold up? We trace the idiom from Cervantes to a 1900s dime novel.
On this episode of Appraise The Phrase, Mario and Twenty unveil the origin, confirm the meaning, and assess the value of the idiom "bigger fish to fry." They start with Sancho Panza in Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605–1615), move through English diarist John Evelyn's 1660 journal entry ("I have other fish to fry" — not published until 1818, over a century after his death), and land on the early-20th-century American novel that's actually responsible for the…
The skinny
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