A “wet fish” handshake is a weak, limp, non-committal grip, the kind that leaves you feeling you have been handed something cold and slippery rather than shaken by it. By extension, calling someone a wet fish can mean they come across as feeble, spineless or lacking any enthusiasm or backbone, someone who offers no resistance and no energy at all. It is an informal, slightly dismissive put-down rather than an outright insult, usually aimed at a person’s manner rather than their character in any deeper sense.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘wet fish’?
Before it became an insult, “wet fish” was a perfectly literal term. In British English it describes fresh, uncooked fish sold in a shop, as distinct from fish that has been tinned, smoked or frozen. Longman’s dictionary gives this plain retail meaning, fresh uncooked fish that is on sale in a shop, the kind a fishmonger would have laid out on ice rather than packaged.
The phrase also has a separate working life in the commercial fishing industry, quite apart from either the retail sense or the figurative insult. There, “wet fish” refers to species that live in open midwater, which have to be hauled aboard along with large quantities of seawater as they are scooped up. Boats working this kind of catch end up pulling a great deal of water in with the fish, which is where the “wet” in this industry usage comes from. This maritime jargon sits behind the phrase quite independently of the handshake meaning.
The figurative sense, used for a limp handshake or a feeble, unimpressive person, is harder to pin down to a first appearance. It belongs to informal, spoken slang rather than to any literary or journalistic coining, and it is best attested today in crowd-sourced slang references rather than historical dictionaries. Urban Dictionary gives a typical example of the usage: “I got such a wet fish handshake from that guy whilst on security.” The image needed little explanation for anyone who has shaken a limp, clammy hand and been reminded, unpleasantly, of handling an actual fish straight from the slab. No earlier printed record of this figurative use has been traced, so the phrase is best treated as a vivid piece of everyday British slang rather than one with a documented literary origin.