Talk:devilfish

RFV discussion: October 2022–February 2023

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devilfish

Meaning octopus / gray whale GreyishWorm (talk) 21:51, 22 October 2022 (UTC)

Octopus: here and here are a couple of obvious ones, and this is made clear by the title itself. There's also an ubiquitous passage in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas where it could be just about any cephalopod- but it's definitely a cephalopod. I suppose that one could be an individual translator's choice of word to represent whatever the original French had. At any rate, searching for "devilfish" and either "octopus" or "arms" turns up enough Google Books hits for it to pass. Chuck Entz (talk) 22:47, 22 October 2022 (UTC)

Gray whale: here, here and here are uses that are clearly referring to whales of some sort. There also are a ton of mentions that make it clear that the species in question is the gray whale. Chuck Entz (talk) 23:11, 22 October 2022 (UTC)

A gallery would be a nice way of making the name seem plausible for all the types of creatures with this name. For the gray whale it must be the skin, covered with barnacles etc., and the baleen. DCDuring (talk) 00:26, 23 October 2022 (UTC)

The mentions I referred to above tend to include explanations of the name: that the whalers gave them the nickname because the whales could be very violent toward whaler's boats when the whales were attacked- especially mothers when their children were involved. Chuck Entz (talk) 00:55, 23 October 2022 (UTC)

RFV Passed, and I replaced the definitions with those in the OED. Ioaxxere (talk) 02:53, 14 February 2023 (UTC)