There are plenty of fish in the sea, but beware the catfish when trawling online. To catfish, from the 2010 documentary of the same name, has come to mean misrepresenting yourself online or instigating a hoax of a relationship. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “To Catfish”
I probably should have mentioned this on the show earlier, but I really didn’t think it was going to catch on.
But here we are two years later, and the movie Catfish, which was released in 2010, has made a slang term kind of last.
And to catfish is to present yourself online as something you’re not.
Or even better, to invent a sweetheart or a lover online and kind of fill out all those social media profiles and pretend that you actually have a real sweetie that’s kind of only visible online.
It’s kind of like the girlfriend, the Canadian girlfriend.
Right.
Anyway, so catfish is being used more and more to mean perpetrating an online scam, particularly where either you’re pretending to be somebody else or you’re pretending you made up a character online who is somehow your lawyer or your girlfriend or somebody that doesn’t really exist.
Yeah, so catfishing and to be catfished, huh?
Yep, exactly.
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