Fish on a Friday

Today I've been wrestling with another of life's great linguistic mysteries. No, it's not the question of why 'valuable' and 'invaluable' are often misused to mean the same thing in English (you can usually put a price on the former, though not on the latter). Nor am I jumping on the pedantic bandwagon of asking whether former athlete Denise Lewis understands what the word 'literally' means. My question is simply this:

What's the difference between a prawn and a shrimp?   

The link above leads to a rather informative, if confusing picture of how we go about naming things (onomasiology). The source goes into some detail about their biological differences and respective habitats. How great would it be if things were always named based on their respective size? In a game of linguistic Top Trumps®, no-one would ever want the shrimp card. And the translator's nightmare comes when we read that the two terms are often used interchangeably. Depending on your preferred dictionary, throw in the fact that both terms can be translated in German as either die Krevette or die Garnele and we have one crazy cocktail – and that's just for starters!

We also learn that British English favours 'prawn', while American English favours 'shrimp' and its associated forms (e.g. 'black tiger shrimp'). This surely proves conclusively that size isn't everything. The choice between different Englishes in translations is usually determined by the client. Though clients often stipulate British English while also specifying that a number of American English conventions be used. Zzz...

In this particular case, however, information online about the specific product made the final decision for me – the shrimp won. On some occasions, I do highlight potential misnomers for different audiences reading a text. But since trade, the Internet and the movement of people have all gone global, and people may or may not be writing text in their native language for monolingual speakers; errors and/or gradually accepted changes in meaning – especially in web content – will become increasingly frequent. We just have to try and keep up!