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The humorous noun piscinity designates the quality or condition of being a fish.
This noun is from:
– the prefix pisci-, meaning: of, or relating to, fish—as in pisciculture, designating the rearing and breeding of fish under controlled conditions;
– the suffix -ity, after the noun humanity.
The noun piscinity occurs, for example, in the title given to a letter published in The Berkshire Eagle (Pittsfield, Massachusetts, USA) of Saturday 20th July 1963 [page 16, column 6]:
Man’s Piscinity
To The Editor of The Eagle:—
A recent article in the New York Times […] spoke of the therapeutic gains achieved by owners of tropical fish in watching their finny charges meander through the carefully controlled climate of their aquatic world. Such gains as a sense of quietude, peace and serenity were noted.
Being personally concerned with the stresses of our hectic world and the high cost of therapeutic services available to help cope with them, I find this new area of therapeutic assuagement particularly inviting, and the cost reasonable. Indeed, a whole new field of piscatorial therapy has beckoned.
I can only invite your attention to my newly discovered, nonpatentable therapy.
These are, in chronological order, the earliest occurrences of the noun piscinity that I have found:
1-: From Game and Fish, published in the Sunday Delta (New Orleans, Louisiana, USA) of Sunday 6th November 1859 [page 1, column 5]:
John Galpin furnished the text, on Wednesday, in a display of piscine glory, which we fearlessly defy the world to equal, much less surpass. It was an ichthyological banquet, composed of specimens of the rare piscinity of the salt waters that lave the shores of Louisiana and the adjacent provinces. There were no less than thirteen distinct tribes represented in this convention—all native, and in a great measure peculiar to our Gulf and bays—all of rare excellence.
2-: From An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy and of the Principal Philosophical Questions Discussed in his Writings (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1865), by the British philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) [chapter 22, page 426]:
Most attributes, and nearly all large “bundles of attributes,” have no names of their own. We can only name them by a circumlocution. We are accustomed to speak of attributes not by names given to themselves, but by means of the names which they give to the objects they are attributes of. We do not talk of the phænomena which accompany piscinity; we talk of the phænomena of fishes. We do not frame a definition of piscinity, but a definition of a fish. The definition, however, of a fish is exactly the same which definition of piscinity would be; it is an enumeration of the same attributes. Language is constructed upon the principle of naming concrete objects first: it does not always name abstractions at all, and when it does, the names are almost always derived from those of concrete objects.
3-: From a review of John Stuart Mill’s Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, published in The Daily Telegraph (London, England) of Wednesday 9th August 1865 [page 3, column 4]:
Our definition of piscinity in general would be precisely that of a fish.
4-: From Deep-Sea Fish, published in The Cornhill Magazine (London, England) of November 1890 [page 542]:
Wherever a chance exists of earning a livelihood somehow, there some man or fish is ever at hand ready to embrace it. Or rather, for every opening there are a dozen men and a dozen fish, all waiting to compete, tooth and nail, against one another, with internecine warfare. It is struggle for life everywhere and with everybody alike; and when the four-mile line is crowded to excess, enterprising pioneers of blind and phosphorescent piscinity will fight with one another, we may be sure, in a deadly scramble, like the Oklahoma rush, to get a first footing in the cold and cheerless five-mile stratum.
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