What have we stopped noticing?
The things we say, do, and accept without thinking twice.
Look closer where it comes from, what it assumes, and the case for keeping it
There are more important or pressing things to deal with than the matter at hand.
The phrase turns a live animal into an object of cooking, with a bigger fish standing for a more important task. The smaller fish is treated as something that can wait.
Frying fish is presented as an ordinary way to deal with an animal, while size becomes a shorthand for importance. In workplace use, the cooking is only an image, but the image still depends on animal killing being ordinary.
The older wording was “other fish to fry”, recorded in English by the seventeenth century. “Bigger fish to fry” is a later form that makes the ranking explicit.
The phrase is compact and widely understood, and most workplace uses are about priorities rather than literal food. The animal image can also pass unnoticed because the expression functions as a familiar idiom.
- fish, n.¹ meanings, etymology and more · Oxford English Dictionary
- BIGGER FISH TO FRY definition and meaning · Collins English Dictionary