I could not help reflecting how much more pleasure it must give one to protect life than to take it away; and how much happier [the fisher] must be in catching the fish with no other intention than to feed them, than it can be with us, to first torture them with hooks and then throw them on the ground to expire in agonies.
Anon., “A Voyage to the World in the Centre of the Earth [1755],” in The Faber Book of Utopias, ed. John Carey (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), 140.
whiting¹ ►noun (pl. same) 1 a slender-bodied marine
fish of the cod family, which lives in shallow Euro-
pean waters and is a commercially important food
fish. ● Merlangius merlangus, family Gadidae.
2 [usu. with modifier] any of a number of similar
marine fishes, in particular: ● a fish of the Indo-Pacific
(family Sillaginidae), including the commercially important
Sillaginoides punctatus of Australia. ● the northern kingfish of
eastern North America.
– ORIGIN Middle English: from Middle Dutch wijting,
from wijt ‘white’.
whiting² ►noun [mass noun] ground chalk used for
purposes such as whitewashing and cleaning metal
plate.
Angus Stevenson, ed., Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 2025. Original emphasis.