To cry stinking fish means to talk down one’s own goods, efforts or abilities, often needlessly undermining something that might otherwise have impressed. It describes a particular kind of self-defeating behaviour: drawing attention to the faults in your own work, pitch or possessions before anyone else gets the chance to criticise them. The phrase is used chiefly in Britain, and is most often heard as an admonition, “don’t cry stinking fish”, aimed at someone who seems bent on running themselves down.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘cry stinking fish’?
The image behind the phrase is a market one. “Cry” here keeps an older sense of the word, meaning to call out goods for sale in the street, the way a fishmonger or other street vendor would shout their wares to passers-by. To cry stinking fish, in that literal picture, is to stand in the street advertising fish that has gone off, undoing your own sale before you have even made it. Carried over into figurative use, the phrase catches anyone who talks down their own produce, work or prospects in the same self-defeating way, drawing a crowd’s attention to the very faults that should have been kept quiet.
No date is available for when the phrase itself settled into this figurative form. The sense of “cry” it depends on, offering wares for sale in public, is well established and explains the image clearly enough, but the idiom’s own first appearance in print is not recorded in the sources at hand. What is clear is that the phrase has become chiefly British usage, carrying the settled meaning of undermining one’s own efforts or putting oneself down. It survives today mainly in that cautionary form, a warning against needless self-criticism rather than a description of actual street trading, which has long since dropped out of the phrase’s working sense.