ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the etymology and earliest usages of ‘shark’, primarily, in the English language and explores how and why its meaning changed. Throughout the Early Modern period, the shark as fish remains imperfectly understood, defined by a limited range of instinctive habits and characteristics. Defiantly non-human, and ‘foreign’ itself, the wonder is that it translates so often and so flexibly onto perceived parallel human traits, almost all of them undesirable, but by the seventeenth century its reputation has been firmly established in modern cultural representation. Can we avoid noticing that sharks fare worse through long association with the wide variety of rapacious or sly human behaviours, a strong indication about which of us is ‘worse’?