fish out of water, a

A person who is out of his or her element. It pre- sumably was observed in ancient times that fish cannot survive long out of water, because their gills cannot take oxygen from the air if they are dry. St. Athanasius is credited as the first to transfer this idea to human beings out of their usual environment, sometime before A.D. 373. The simile reappears in numerous fourteenth-century writings, by John Wycliffe, Geoffrey Chaucer, and others, and survives as a cliché to the present day.