Words - skip - Brewer’s

Whale

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Very like a whale. Very much like a cock-and-bull story; a fudge. Hamlet chaffs Poloʹnius by comparing a cloud to a camel, and then to a weasel, and when the courtier assents Hamlet adds, “Or like a whale”; to which Polonius answers, “Very like a whale.” (Act iii. 2.)

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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.