Red herring
A red herring is a clue or piece of information which is intended to be misleading, or distracting from the actual issue.[1] For example, in mystery fiction, where the identity of a criminal is being sought, an innocent party may be purposefully cast in a guilty light by the author through the employment of deceptive clues, false emphasis, "loaded" words or other descriptive tricks of the trade. The reader's suspicions are thus misdirected, allowing the true culprit to go (temporarily at least) undetected. A false protagonist is another example of a red herring.
In a literal sense, there is no such fish species as a "red herring"; rather it refers to a particularly strong kipper, meaning a fish—typically a herring but not always—that has been strongly cured in brine and/or heavily smoked. This process makes the fish particularly pungent smelling and, with a strong enough brine, turns its flesh reddish.[2] This term, in its literal sense as a strongly cured kipper, can be dated to the late Middle Ages, as quoted here c1400 Femina (Trin-C B.14.40) 27: "He eteþ no ffyssh But heryng red." Samuel Pepys used it in his diary entry of 28 February 1660 "Up in the morning, and had some red herrings to our breakfast, while my boot-heel was a-mending, by the same token the boy left the hole as big as it was before."[3]
The idiomatic sense of "red herring" has, until very recently,[2] been thought to originate from a supposed technique of training young scent hounds.[2] There are variations of the story, but according to one version, the pungent red herring would be dragged along a trail until a puppy learned to follow the scent.[4] Later, when the dog was being trained to follow the faint odour of a fox or a badger, the trainer would drag a red herring (whose strong scent confuses the animal) perpendicular to the animal's trail to confuse the dog.[5] The dog would eventually learn to follow the original scent rather than the stronger scent. An alternate etymology points to escaping convicts who would use the pungent fish to throw off hounds in pursuit.[6]
In reality, the technique was probably never used to train hounds[7] or help desperate criminals. The idiom probably originates from an article published 14 February 1807 by radical journalist William Cobbett in his polemical Political Register.[2][8] In a critique of the English press, which had mistakenly reported Napoleon's defeat, Cobbett recounted that he had once used a red herring to deflect hounds in pursuit of a hare, adding "It was a mere transitory effect of the political red-herring; for, on the Saturday, the scent became as cold as a stone."[2] As British etymologist Michael Quinion says, "This story, and [Cobbett's] extended repetition of it in 1833, was enough to get the figurative sense of red herring into the minds of his readers, unfortunately also with the false idea that it came from some real practice of huntsmen."[2]
Although Cobbett most famously proposed it, he was not the first to consider red herring for scenting hounds, an earlier reference to this hunting practice occurs in the pamphlet "Nashe's Lenten Stuffe" published in 1599 by the Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe, in which he says "Next, to draw on hounds to a scent, to a red herring skin there is nothing comparable."[9] The Oxford English Dictionary makes no connection with Nashe's quote and the figurative meaning of red herring, only in the sense of a hunting practice.[1]
[edit] See also
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Look up red herring in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
[edit] References
- ^ a b Oxford English Dictionary. red herring, n. Third edition, September 2009; online version December 2011. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/160314; accessed 18 December 2011. An entry for this word was first included in New English Dictionary, 1904.
- ^ a b c d e f Quinion, Michael (2002–2008). "The Lure of the Red Herring". World Wide Words. http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/herring.htm. Retrieved November 10, 2010.
- ^ Pepys Samuel (1893). "The Diary of Samuel Pepys M.A. F.R.S.". Samuel Pepys' Diary. http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1660/02/28/index.php. Retrieved February 21, 2006.
- ^ Thomas Nashe, Nashes Lenten Stuffe (1599): "Next, to draw on hounds to a sent, to a redde herring skinne there is nothing comparable." (Since Nashe makes this statement not in a serious reference to hunting but as an aside in a humorous pamphlet, the professed aim of which is to extol the wonderful virtues of red herrings, it need not be evidence of actual practice. In the same paragraph he makes other unlikely claims, such as that the fish dried and powdered is a prophylactic for kidney or gallstones.)
- ^ Currall, J.E.P; M.S. Moss; S.A.J. Stuart (2008). "Authenticity: a red herring?". Journal of Applied Logic 6 (4): 534–544. doi:10.1016/j.jal.2008.09.004. ISSN 1570-8683.
- ^ Hendrickson, R. (2000). The facts on file encyclopedia of word and phrase origins. United States: Checkmark.
- ^ The use of herring to throw off pursuing scent hounds was tested in a 2010 episode of the Discovery Channel series MythBusters. Although the hound used in the test stopped to eat the fish and lost the fugitive's scent for a while, he eventually backtracked and located his target, resulting in the myth being classified as "Busted".
- ^ "...we used, in order to draw oft' the harriers from the trail of a hare that we had set down as our own private property, get to her haunt early in the morning, and drag a red-herring, tied to a string, four or five miles over hedges and ditches..." For the full original story by Cobbett, see "Continental War" on pg. 231-33 of Political Register, February 14, 1807. In Cobbett's political register, Volume XI, 1807 at Internet Archive
- ^ Nashe, Thomas (1599) Praise of the Red Herring In: William Oldys and John Malham (Eds) The Harleian miscellany Volume 2, Printed for R. Dutton, 1809. Page 331.
