A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
fluke
A fluke is the flat triangular half of a whale’s tail, and a whale has two of them. The same word names the flat triangular arm of an anchor that digs into the bottom, the barbed head of a harpoon, and, in older English, a flatfish. It also names a group of flat parasitic worms.
Etymology
All of these come from the Old English word for a flatfish, which is still the name of a European flounder. The whale’s tail, the anchor arm, and the parasite are all named for being flat and roughly diamond-shaped, so a word for a fish spread across four unrelated things purely on the strength of an outline. The fluke that means a stroke of luck is probably a separate word entirely, first recorded as a term from billiards.
Notes
The trailing edge of a humpback’s flukes carries a pattern of scarring and pigment unique to the individual, and photographs of it have been used as an identification system since the 1970s, which is how individual whales are tracked across ocean basins and across decades. A whale that lifts its flukes clear of the water before sounding is fluking up, and the gesture usually means it is going deep.