Gudgeon

Gaping for gudgeons. Looking out for things extremely improbable. As a gudgeon is a bait to deceive fish, it means a lie, a deception.

To swallow a gudgeon. To be bamboozled with a most palpable lie, as silly fish are caught by gudgeons. (French, goujon, whence the phrase faire avaler le goujon, to humbug.)

“Make fools believe in their foreseeing

Of things before they are in being;

To swallow gudgeons ere theyʹre catched,

And count their chickens ere theyʹre hatched.”

Butler: Hudibras, ii. 3.

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Entry taken from Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, edited by the Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D. and revised in 1895.