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“Tuna”
Please, “Tuna Fish” is my father. Just call me “Tuna”.
As far as I know Tuna-fish is only a nth American thing and sounds very weird to my ears.
So this vote will likely be Nth America vs the rest.
Honestly, why only tuna fish?
Salmon-fish?
Chicken-bird?
Is it really that hard to write the word “north”? Is that even what nth is supposed to mean? I keep reading it as the mathematical “1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th…, nth” and it makes my head hurt
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Swordfish? Plenty other languages keep the fish-part in the Tuna name, also
Not the same as there is no one calling a swordfish just sword.
Plenty other languages keep the fish-part in the Tuna name
Do they? Which ones?
Hungarian here. Probably it would sound weird without the ‘fish’ bit, since we call it ‘tonhal’ (‘hal’ meaning fish). I just can’t imagine someone offering some tuna to me, asking ‘Ton?’.
EDIT: However, in English, I call it tuna, not tuna fish.
Danish/swedish/norwegian, tunfisk/tonfisk
German for example
We do have a tuna cactus here that people eat. Nopales are from the Tuna. Prickly pear fruit also. That cactus is called Tuna here.
I mean the fish when I say Tuna though, and would say Prickly Pear cactus.
But do hear Tuna often used to mean the plant.
And what about the tuna-cat and tuna-bird?
There’s a few other redundant versions, like how they say “horse-back riding”. Why not bikeseat riding or plane cockpit flying?
Human-sapien?
Human-homo?
Human-mammal would be the closest taxonomically.
All you crazy foreigners just don’t realize. 'Merica has no regulations, sense, or laws. We call it “Tuna Fish” because just “Tuna” is sawdust and cat liter.
I consider “tuna fish” to be outdated and regional to the South and maybe Midwest US. I grew up hearing it but at some point started wondering why tf we would say that rather than just tuna, so I’ve made a point to just say tuna since then.
Huh, I grew up in the South and never realized it wasn’t normal to say tuna fish sandwich. I guess it doesn’t really make sense, but I still kinda like the ring of it
It is normal, I guess. I grew up with my mother and grandmother saying that. I decided it was silly and I should stop, though.
Is there a tuna that is not fish?
Tuna piano?
There is, yes … that’s the main Spanish name for prickly pear.
Up until around 1907, your odds of encountering the fruit by the name “tuna” were about the same as the fish, when the first commercial canneries started to pop up in California… hence, a habit of clarifying between the two that stuck, even though most folks outside of the southwest had never heard of a tuna cactus.
Fascinating. I’ll add a slight addition of info that prickly pears are actually present in the Midwestern and eastern parts of the US. Saw them growing in the wild at the Indiana Dunes national park last year. Very weird to see cacti that far north, but there they were.
Never knew the Spanish name for them!
Thanks for the info :)
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Tuna can?
You can’t tuna fish otherwise you risk it becoming a bass.
Are there Tunas that aren’t fish? We just say Tuna here in California unless we ask for yellow fin tuna or blue fin tuna
Yeah, prickly pears are tuna fruit, from the tuna cactus
From some reason I feel like I’m playing The Outer Worlds while reading this discussion.
For some reason if I think of a tuna fish sandwich I imagine canned tuna, but if I think tuna sandwich I imagine whole seared tuna.
Ditto
Neither. I never order a tuna sandwich. I sometimes make myself a tuna sandwich. 😂
This :-) and
whenever I ordered something with tuna, it was always ‘tonno’
gourmet
I order a tuna salad sandwich or a tuna sandwich, but I grew up hearing tuna fish… specifically in reference to the stuff that came in a can.
Both were equally common years ago but over time, “tuna” sans fish has won out… likely because fresh, non canned tuna is very common.
I read an article a while ago that theorized the reason for Americans calling it “tuna fish” was that it rose to prominence as a canned staple good in the 1940s, and many Americans who didn’t live on the coasts had never heard of tuna before. Its light meat, when canned and cooked, was very mild and chicken-y compared with the heavily salted, oily canned fish folks were familiar with, hence both “chicken of the sea” and the precaution of labeling the can with not only tuna, but “fish”.
I think an alternate explanation is probably more likely… the 1919 Oxford English Dictionary describes “Tuna” as an alternative spelling of “tunny”, the old name for the fish (still used in a culinary sense in Britain) … not coincidentally:
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Californians would also have been familiar with the other tuna… tuna fruit, the prickly pear.
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Possessed of both a fruit and a fish of the same name, distinguishing one from the other when canning fish seems reasonable
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The largest canneries of tuna (e.g., the one that ultimately became Chicken of the Sea) were all based in California.
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Tooter fish popkin
Tuna. I’m in the midwest. I’ve lived on the west coast. I just assumed “tuna fish” was an east coast thing.
Tuna fish = The animal
Tuna = The meat
It’s like with cows and beef
I drink the milk of the beef fish.
Sounds fine.
Nah. cow and beef came about due to the Norman conquest of England.
The lords spoke French and so were served bœuf (which became beef overtime), while the peasants spoke English and tended cows in the field.
Tuna.
Cat food
