To flounder is to struggle, whether that struggle is about moving or obtaining footing (as in “horses floundering through deep snow”) or about knowing what to do or say.

// Caught off-guard by the reporter’s question, the mayor floundered for a few moments before remembering the talking points he had rehearsed.

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“In those early days we floundered in a city we didn’t know. Tottenham in 1992 wasn’t the London we’d imagined. There were no top hats, no smog, no Holmes, no Watson, no ladies, no gents, and no afternoon tea. Not for us. We lived in a different London. In our London, people swore and spat, drank, quarreled, and laughed in fretful bursts. They spoke strange words in accents we couldn’t parse.” — Leo Vardiashvili, Hard By a Great Forest, 2024

There’s nothing fishy about flounder... the verb, that is. While the noun referring to a common food fish is of Scandinavian origin, the verb flounder, which dates to the late 16th century, is likely an alteration of an older verb, founder. The two verbs have been confused ever since. Today, founder is most often used as a synonym of fail, or, in contexts involving a waterborne vessel, as a word meaning “to fill with water and sink.” Formerly, it was also frequently applied when a horse stumbled badly and was unable to keep walking. It’s likely this sense of founder led to the original and now-obsolete meaning of flounder: “to stumble.” In modern use, flounder typically means “to struggle” or “to act clumsily”; the word lacks the finality of founder, which usually suggests complete collapse or failure, as that of a sinking ship.