When a person has perplexed his affairs in general, or any particular business, he is said to have made a fine kettle of fish of it.
A bad state of affairs : mess : something to be considered or reckoned with : matter (books and discs… were two very different kettles of fish — Roland Gelatt)
A punishment in use among the Dutch seamen, in which, for certain offences, the delinquent is drawn once, or oftener, under the ship’s keel: ludicrously defined, undergoing a great hard-ship.
To haul under the keel of a ship as punishment or torture : to rebuke severely
Teeth. How the swell flashed his ivories; how the gentleman shewed(sic) his teeth.
–From the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.
Money in general. To polish the king’s iron with one’s eyebrows; to look out of grated or prison windows, or, as the Irishman expresses them, the iron glass windows. Iron doublet; a prison.
