kettle [OE] Originally a kettle was any container used to heat water over a fire. There may be a clue as to how a pretty kettle of fish, where the pretty is ironical, developed. A travel book of the 1790s describes ‘a kettle of fish’ as a term used in Berwick-upon-Tweed for a high-society picnic where freshly caught salmon were cooked in kettles on the banks of the River Tweed. Kettle goes back to Latin catinus ‘a deep container for cooking or serving food’. The first example of the pot calling the kettle black, meaning that a person’s criticisms of another could equally well apply to themselves, dates from 1693.