red herring

The popular story

The tale most often told is a tidy one. A red herring – a herring cured until it is brown, hard and pungent – was supposedly dragged across a trail to throw hunting dogs off a scent. Poachers are said to have used the trick to distract gamekeepers’ hounds; others claim that trainers of young foxhounds deliberately laid a herring line to teach the pack to hold a true scent despite temptation. On this account the idiom is a straightforward transfer from field to figure of speech: a real object that misleads a real dog becomes a metaphor for anything that misleads the mind.

It is a satisfying story because it seems to explain both halves of the phrase at once – why the fish is red and why the herring misleads. The colour is easy enough: a herring left to cure in brine and smoke for days turns a deep reddish-brown and gives off a smell strong enough, so the story goes, to overwhelm any other scent on the ground. The neatness of the explanation is precisely what should make us cautious, because a phrase whose “origin” accounts for every detail so conveniently is often a phrase whose origin has been reverse-engineered.

What the record shows

The earliest known figurative use of the phrase comes not from the hunting field but from political journalism. On 14 February 1807 the radical writer William Cobbett, in his Weekly Political Register, attacked the London newspapers for swallowing a false report that Napoleon had been defeated, and so neglecting affairs at home. To ridicule them he offered a boyhood memory:

When I was a boy, we used, in order to draw off 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, across fields and through coppices, till we got to a point, whence we were pretty sure the hunters would not return to the spot where we had left puss.

Cobbett then turned the image on the press, which had been lured away from the real “scent” of domestic politics by a sensational falsehood. He describes the effect of the diversion as a political red-herring whose power soon faded – by the Saturday, he wrote, the scent had gone as cold as a stone. The point of the anecdote is not the fish but the gullibility of the hunters, human and canine alike, who can be pulled from a true trail by a strong false one. From this polemic, and from its many reprintings and imitations, the modern metaphor spread through the nineteenth century.

The crucial finding, established by later etymological research – notably work published in the journal Comments on Etymology and summarised by word historians – is that no independent evidence supports the idea that dragging a red herring was ever a recognised, established practice for training or deceiving hounds. Trails for exercising young dogs were certainly laid, using a variety of drags, but the specific notion of the red herring as a deliberate trick to mislead cannot be documented before Cobbett and appears to originate with his illustration. The popular “origin”, in other words, is a reconstruction that reads the finished metaphor backwards into an imagined and tidy custom that the records do not confirm.

The verdict

This is a folk-etymology. The phrase is genuinely old enough to feel proverbial, but the story usually offered for it – that it faithfully records a real and widespread hunting trick – is a later rationalisation. The honest account is narrower and more interesting: a single, rhetorically gifted journalist coined the figurative sense in 1807 to shame his rivals, using a vivid anecdote that may or may not have described anything he actually did as a boy. There is no reliable record of red herring meaning “misleading distraction” before that date, and the burden of proof rests on anyone who would push the phrase earlier. It is a useful reminder that the most confident-sounding origin stories are often the ones assembled after the fact to make a phrase feel inevitable.

What we don’t know

We cannot confirm that Cobbett’s boyhood escapade happened at all; it may have been invented or embroidered for effect, which would be entirely in character for a writer who prized a good illustration. We also cannot trace every step by which the phrase passed from his political writing into general and then literary use. What is clear is that by the later nineteenth century it was current enough to attach itself to the false clue of detective fiction and, later still, to the vocabulary of formal logic. The gap between Cobbett’s coinage and its full generalisation is real but unrecorded in detail, as is usually the case with phrases that live mainly in speech.

How it changed

Cobbett’s political red herring was a false story that distracted the press. Once detached from that context, the phrase generalised to any distraction whatever. Writers of mystery and crime fiction adopted it for the false lead deliberately planted to fool the reader – the innocent suspect, the misplaced clue – until it became one of the genre’s standard tools and then one of its standard terms. Logicians and debaters took it up as the name of a fallacy: the irrelevant point that diverts an argument from its proper course, changing the subject under cover of appearing to address it. In each case the core image survives intact: a strong, false scent laid across the trail of the truth.

Usage today

Today a red herring is anything introduced, deliberately or accidentally, to draw attention away from the real issue: a distracting subplot, a misleading statistic, a rhetorical dodge, a suspect who turns out to be innocent. It is equally at home in a book review, a courtroom, a science lesson on logical fallacies, and everyday complaint (“that’s a red herring – stick to the point”). The cured fish itself has all but vanished from British tables, and few who use the phrase have ever seen one, but its metaphorical smell lingers wherever someone is being led, gently or cunningly, in the wrong direction.