Fishy metaphor

The excerpt feature in Google Books sometimes delivers surreal gems, Escher stones. Here’s one from Advance Japan: A Nation Thoroughly in Earnest: “that the equivalent of the expression ‘not worth a button’ is, in Japanese, ‘not worth the head of a sardine.’ Mackerel also are extremely plentiful.”

(I’m translating some mid-nineteenth century colloquial Flemish and I’m hitting this kind of stuff by using the date filter of the corpus in order to arrive at authentic-feeling English.)

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