Polyhymnia · Daily Eloquencea fishing expedition
A broad, unfocused inquiry launched in the hope that something incriminating turns up.
It works by recategorizing: an inquiry becomes a pastime, so the charge of aimlessness arrives disguised as plain description.
The mismatch inside the phrase does the rest — expedition promises Lewis and Clark, fishing delivers a folding chair and a cooler.
And it's the lighter of the two charges available — a witch hunt alleges persecution, while this one alleges only that you're searching with nothing behind you, which is harder to answer without showing your hand.
“Happy to pull the invoice, but anything past that starts to feel like a fishing expedition.”
Answering a manager who wants three years of your team's email over a single billing discrepancy.
“They say it's about the fence, but they've asked for every permit since 2019 — that's a fishing expedition.”
Comparing notes with a neighbor about a homeowners-association inquiry into everyone's renovations.
It's an accusation, not a description — say it and you've claimed the other side has no case, so don't reach for it when all you want is a narrower scope. It has also become the reflex defense of anyone under scrutiny, which means the guilty and the innocent sound identical using it.
Call an inquiry a fishing expedition and you've alleged no persecution — only that there's nothing behind it, which is harder to answer.
▸More — where it lives, variations, references
Time-honored in American courtrooms — what lawyers reach for when discovery starts casting too wide — long since escaped into politics and the press.
The stress lands hard on FISH-ing; expedition rides in behind it, quicker and lighter. Give the first word its full weight or the mockery goes missing.
- · go fishing
- · cast a wide net (neutral — describes breadth without the insult)
- · a witch hunt (harsher — alleges malice, not merely aimlessness)
- fishing expedition — Merriam-Webster (inquiry unnecessarily extensive or unrelated to the issues)
- fishing expedition — Cornell LII / Wex (US legal definition, discovery abuse)
- Hickman v. Taylor, 329 U.S. 495 (1947) — "the time-honored cry of 'fishing expedition'"
- fishing expedition, n. — Oxford English Dictionary (earliest evidence 1869, Glasgow Herald)
- a fishing expedition — Cambridge Dictionary (current idiomatic sense)
- Fishing Expedition — Political Dictionary (pretextual inquiry after damaging material; relation to "witch hunt")