Etymology has always been a nerdy fascination of mine. Maybe it’s because I took Latin for seven years starting in the sixth grade. I discovered that maybe it wasn’t the smartest idea when I tried to take a spoken language for the first time in college and didn’t exactly pass my first conversation class. So, when I found out that there was an interesting divergence in the etymology, or naming, of two very closely related fishes, it seemed appropriate to write about them, particularly because they are not always the headliner fish species in the Maine seafood world.
This is the case for fluke. While I think of the word fluke as being something unexpected and maybe not in line with particular conventions, the word “fluke” actually comes from the Germanic root for “flat.” And that is a better description of the fish than the typical use of the term in the English language. That’s because fluke is the common name of a summer flounder, one of the many very flat fish that live in the Gulf of Maine. They are the somewhat oddball fish that lie on the ocean floor with two eyes that peek out of the sand looking up into the water for tasty things to eat. They’re sandy in color and have pretty impressive camouflage that looks a lot like the sand in which they reside. Or, at least, that’s where they reside in the summer when they travel into shallower waters, hence their other common name, “summer flounder.”
This distinguishes them from their close relative, the winter flounder, which spends the colder months closer to shore and doesn’t do the same type of seasonal migration. The commonality is that they are both species of flounder. But beyond that, there are some somewhat significant differences, the first of which is etymological. To “flounder” is quite different than for something to be a “fluke.” There’s an undecided nature of floundering that comes from a different linguistic base — the Dutch. “Flodderen” means to flop about without a sense of particular direction. Maybe that speaks to the fact that winter flounders have no teeth and spend their winters floundering about in Maine waters.
One thing they do have in common, however, is that at some point during their development, both fluke and flounder end up with two eyes on the same sides of their bodies. The difference, however, is that flukes end up with their eyes on the left side of their body and flounders end up with their eyes on the right. This all gets to why people in the scientific community revert to scientific names — because flukes are sometimes called left-eyed flounder or summer flounder, and winter flounder are sometimes called right-eyed flounder. Calling a species simply by its Latin name makes it much clearer than the descriptive names, even though those often help us to understand what these creatures look like. As for flatfish, which side the eyes end up on is a helpful tool in differentiating species. But on the whole, knowing which is which is not that important for appreciating any of the flatfish found in the Gulf of Maine.
Whatever side their eyes end up on, fluke or flounder, our local flatfish species, as we can more broadly categorize them, are all too likely to be forgotten among the big names of cod and haddock that garner first-place slotting on menus and in headlines. But they are abundant and delicious and both worth eating and spending a few moments looking up quirky videos of to see their oddly eyeballed bodies and movements as they either stay stock-still hiding from predators or undulate on the seafloor as they shake off their disguises and hunt for prey.
Susan Olcott is the director of operations at Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association.
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