Where does the saying " A different kettle of fish " come from ??

Answer 1

This seems to be a variant on "a pretty kettle of fish" and "a fine kettle of fish" and boil down to (if I may be excused the pun) a different state of affairs.

fine kettle of fish -- A kiddle or kiddle net is a basket set in the sluice ways of dams to catch fish, a device well known from the time of the Plantagenets. Royal officers had the perquisite to trap fish in kiddles, but poachers often raided the traps of fish, frequently destroying the kiddles in the process. Possibly an official came upon a destroyed trap and exclaimed, 'That's a pretty kiddle of fish!' or something similar, meaning 'a pretty sorry state of affairs!' and the phrase was born. Repeated over the years, kiddle was corrupted in everyday speech to kettle, giving us the expression as we know it today." From the "Encylopedia of Word and Phrase Origins" by Robert Hendrickson (Facts on File, New York, 1997).

A pretty kettle of fish is an expression used to indicate that there is a mess, problem or predicament. There are at least two possible origins, the first of which relates to a Kiddle. This was a grille put across a stream to catch fish. It could become full of weeds and only a few fish; alternatively, the fish might have become damaged. In any case there was a pretty kiddle of fish.
The second theory is more accepted. In this instance the "kettle", the local name for a cooking pot, was taken on picnics by Scottish gentry. Salmon were caught straight from the river and cooked on the bankside. Such an outing was known as a kettle of fish. How the current usage arose is not clear, but one can imagine all sorts of disasters being the cause.

Answer 2

Unlike docecil, who lifted her answer wholesale from "World Wide Words", I am happy to give due credit to the original sourse for my answer. ;-)

: "fine kettle of fish -- A kiddle or kiddle net is a basket set in the sluice ways of dams to catch fish, a device well known from the time of the Plantagenets. Royal officers had the perquisite to trap fish in kiddles, but poachers often raided the traps of fish, frequently destroying the kiddles in the process. Possibly an official came upon a destroyed trap and exclaimed, 'That's a pretty kiddle of fish!' or something similar, meaning 'a pretty sorry state of affairs!' and the phrase was born. Repeated over the years, kiddle was corrupted in everyday speech to kettle, giving us the expression as we know it today." From the "Encylopedia of Word and Phrase Origins" by Robert Hendrickson (Facts on File, New York, 1997).

A pretty kettle of fish is an expression used to indicate that there is a mess, problem or predicament. There are at least two possible origins, the first of which relates to a Kiddle. This was a grille put across a stream to catch fish. It could become full of weeds and only a few fish; alternatively, the fish might have become damaged. In any case there was a pretty kiddle of fish.
The second theory is more accepted. In this instance the "kettle", the local name for a cooking pot, was taken on picnics by Scottish gentry. Salmon were caught straight from the river and cooked on the bankside. Such an outing was known as a kettle of fish. How the current usage arose is not clear, but one can imagine all sorts of disasters being the cause.

Answer 3

a different kettle of fish is a combinatin of two other phrases: a horse of a different color and a pretty/fine kettle of fish. The former has been discussed herein. The latter has got an interesting etymology of its own, which is especially close to home for you in the U.K. A kettle of fish was the term used to describe the fish-boil picnics held in Scotland at the beginning of salmon season. During these picnics, the freshly caught fish were thrown into huge kettles, or cauldrons, of boiling water, and they were eaten with one's fingers. This was likely a messy, even noisome affair, and so the term came to mean, by the early 18th century, anything which was `confusing' or `a mess.'

Answer 4

It’s originally British.

There are actually two common idioms based around the phrase a kettle of fish. One is yours, which means “This is a different matter from the one previously mentioned”. The other is more of an exclamation: either as a pretty kettle of fish! or a fine kettle of fish!, meaning that some awkward state of affairs has arisen. The latter is much older, dating from the eighteenth century, while yours is twentieth-century and seems to be derived from it.

Nobody is really sure where the expression comes from, but we do know that the phrase a kettle of fish was originally a literal term. These days, especially in Britain and Commonwealth countries, we think of a kettle as a small enclosed container with a handle and spout for boiling water to make our tea. (I believe that Americans are less familiar with this essential item of kitchenware.) In the eighteenth century, though, a kettle was any large vessel used to boil stuff in.

There was, it seems, a custom by which the gentry on the Scottish border with England would hold a picnic (though that term was not then known) by a river. The custom was described by Thomas Newte in his Tour of England and Scotland in 1785: “It is customary for the gentlemen who live near the Tweed to entertain their neighbours and friends with a Fete Champetre, which they call giving ‘a kettle of fish’. Tents or marquees are pitched near the flowery banks of the river ... a fire is kindled, and live salmon thrown into boiling kettles”.

What puzzles scholars is how this literal reference became an idiom—assuming, of course, that the phrase comes from the custom, which is far from certain. There is a clue in early examples, in which the term was used in the sense of a mess, muddle or confusion caused by one’s own misguided actions. For example, in Captain Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue of 1811, it’s explained like this: “When a person has perplexed his affairs in general, or any particular business, he is said to have made a fine kettle of fish of it”. And a little later, Thomas Chandler Haliburton of Nova Scotia used it the same way in his Clockmaker: “There’s an end to the Clock trade now, and a pretty kettle of fish I’ve made of it, haven’t I? I shall never hear the last on it”.

Could it be that the contents of the kettles of fish looked messy after the fish had broken up under the influence of the boiling water? It would make sense of the early examples. But that’s just a guess.

Subscriber Henk Rietveld wrote to say that he had heard, while working in Newfoundland, that kettle of fish was a corruption of quintal of fish, a measure either of 100 pounds or a hundredweight. This is possible, since quintal was also known in the forms kintal and kentle in Newfoundland and New England, the last of which could easily have been misheard as kettle. It can’t be ruled out as a possibility, since the quintal was the usual way of measuring fish catches. Against it is the important point that the idiom kettle of fish seems to have been known first in Britain but that kentle is an American form.

Answer 5

Im not sure, but you do get something called a kettle to cook fish in.

Answer 6

used in the fishing indestry to descibe there catch