Choose the correct meaning of idiom: To cry stinking fish

Correct — D. To cry stinking fish is to run down your own goods, work or efforts.

The picture is a street seller. To cry wares is to call them out for sale, so a fish-seller who cries 'stinking fish' is warning buyers off his own stock.

Belittling what is your own is undervaluing your own worth or effort → option (d).

Why the others are wrong

• (a)
  Boasting excessively — Boasting excessively is the reverse. A boaster overpraises what is his own, while the idiom describes someone who runs it down, the opposite of blowing your own trumpet.
• (b)
  Ridiculing others — Ridiculing others points outward. The stinking fish belongs to the seller who cries it, so the idiom is about disparaging your own things, not mocking other people.
• (c)
  Taking pride silently — Taking pride silently fails twice: to cry is to call aloud, not to keep silent, and what the idiom expresses is disparagement, not pride.

An idiom item tests the figurative sense of a fixed phrase, which the separate words may not give you.

Here they do, once cry is read in its trade sense: a hawker cries his wares, calling them out in the street. A seller who cries his own fish as stinking is talking his own business down.

So the idiom means self-disparagement, belittling your own work, goods or worth. Its opposite is blow your own trumpet, to boast about yourself.

Key facts

• To cry stinking fish means to disparage your own goods, work or efforts.
• In the idiom, cry has its trade sense: to call out wares for sale in the street.
• Blow your own trumpet, meaning to boast about yourself, is its opposite.

Common traps

• Picking Boasting excessively because crying out sounds like loud self-advertisement, without noticing that the seller calls his own fish stinking
• Picking Ridiculing others because the idiom sounds like mockery, when its target is the speaker's own goods

No directly related past PYQ was found.