Quote:
Originally Posted by Dazrin
Newsflash: Words that mean one thing here and now mean different things there and then.
Calling the fish "dolphin" made me pause for a second but it wasn't enough to stop my enjoyment of things. I could tell from context that he was talking about a fish, not a mammal, and therefore must be using the word in a way I was not familiar with. Given that I know next to nothing about Cuba, the language or the culture, and that the book is almost 70 years old, I expected to find words that I wasn't familiar with or used in unusual (to me) ways, so it wasn't a problem for me to get past that.
Wondering about Jon's editor comment, I did some further digging. It turns out that mahi-mahi, or the "common dolphinfish" is commonly called just "dolphin" or "dorado" and, furthermore, it is only a recent change to the name to even call them "dolphinfish", they were originally just called dolphins.
This certainly doesn't appear to be an editorial mistake. Just changes to our language over the last 70 years.
References: 1, 2 |
When did it change? I've always heard of Dolphin meaning what it does now and that's more than 1/2 the life of the book. So it cannot be all that recent.