Meaning & Analysis
Extremely thin—like a herring after it has spawned (‘shotten’), having shed its roe or milt and thus left gaunt and bony.
Insights
Emaciation
A vivid way to say a person looks starved or wasted: cheeks fallen in, frame stringy, clothes hanging loose.
Spent Vitality
Signals depletion after heavy exertion—work, illness, grief, or dissipation—when reserves are emptied and the body shows the bill.
Poverty and Want
Marks the social signs of shortage: a life scraped thin by scarcity, visible in the body’s own ledger.
Afterglow of Excess
Hints that pleasure or vice can leave one ‘shotten’—the post-feast, post-binge hollowness when glitter has gone and stamina is drained.
Seasonal Frailty
Like fish run down after spawning, humans, too, cycle through lean seasons—times when strength and substance ebb.
Fishmongers’ Knowledge
‘Shotten’ is trade-speech: a spent herring is visibly slack-bellied and poor eating. The proverb carries quay-side expertise into everyday judgment.
Etymological Snap
From ‘to shoot/shot’ (to shed), the term encodes action and aftermath—an organism emptied of its generative load stands as a type of depletion.
Stage to Street
Playhouse banter (e.g., Shakespeare’s Falstaff calling himself a ‘shotten herring’) popularized the simile, making maritime realism a comic staple for thinness.
Kin Sayings
Clusters with ‘lean as a rake/lath,’ but adds biology: not just skinny, but skinny because spent—an extra layer of narrative cause.
Moral Coloring
Depending on context it can pity hardship or mock self-inflicted waste—its bite or balm turns on whether leanness is blamed or lamented.
Rhetorical Devices
Simile
The ‘as X as Y’ frame delivers instant calibration of degree, mapping an abstract thinness onto a familiar, concrete fish.
Technical Imagery
Specificity (‘shotten herring’) heightens vividness; the technical term carries sensory detail—slack belly, sharp bones.
Alliteration & Soundplay
Soft s- and h-sounds (‘shotten herring’) and the l in ‘lean/lank’ give the phrase a memorable, almost wheezing whisper.
Metonymy
The fish stands in for the condition of exhaustive thinness, letting a species embody a human state.
Hyperbole
Exaggerates skinniness to the edge of caricature, useful for comic sting or emphatic pity.
Transcription
Quotations
Thou hadst alate . . a louely fat paire of cheekes, and now thou lookest like a shotten herring.
(lank).
I look like a shotten herring . . I have no more Roe than a goose in me.
As lean as a rake, or a shotten herring.
To be slender, slank, and spiney of body; by drollery, to be as lean as a lath, or a shodden herring.
To seem to have eaten a lyzard, viz. to be lean, thin, and shank, as a shodden herring.
Thou lookest as if thou wert half starv'd; like a shotten herring.
Shakespeare Citations
Go thy ways, old Jack, die when thou wilt; if manhood, good manhood, be not forgot upon the face of the earth, then am I a shotten herring.
Cross References
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.