Time Traveler for red herring The first known use of red herring was in the 15th century See more words from the same century. Listen to Our Podcast About red herring. Get Word of the Day delivered to your inbox! Sign Up. Style: MLA. English Language Learners Definition of red herring. Legal Definition of red herring. History and Etymology for red herring red herring something that distracts attention from the main issue, diversion.
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Ask Question. Asked 10 years, 5 months ago. Active 2 years, 8 months ago. Viewed k times. Improve this question. Sven Yargs k 30 30 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. Mark Meuer Mark Meuer 1 1 gold badge 3 3 silver badges 6 6 bronze badges. Sorry about that. This was my first foray into English. I'll try to more diligent about that in the future. Bogdan Lataianu: You may be a bit 'previous' there.
I'm going to raise the matter of 'red herring' in metaphorical use. There may well be something worth investigating here Just as a followup in case anyone looks here to find out the origin of this word or others, there's a great etymology dictionary online these days: etymonline.
Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Edit: Also there's this wiktionary entry It originated from a news story by English journalist William Cobbett, c.
Improve this answer. Philoto Philoto 5, 21 21 silver badges 15 15 bronze badges. Yes, but it's important to quote also from wiktionary: "Until , the accepted etymology of the idiom was that red herring were used to train dogs to track scents. This has proven to be a false etymology " with a link to worldwidewords.
I don't think ask. Well, we're not very interested in wrong etymologies, even if they were considered as right ones for almost two centuries, right? Anyway, I think it all is very interesting. But it's also very good to label false etymology as such.
So, Theta30, are you implying that ask. A match that is potentially even earlier, but is limited to a snippet view and therefore not fully confirmed, appears in The Universal Museum and Complete Magazine , volume 2 , date not confirmed [combined snippets]: Lord G. Conclusion In all three cases red herring as dog-training scent, red herring as consubstantiated bacon, and red herring as false prize at the end of long service , the fish can be seen as a metaphor for deception.
Community Bot 1. Sven Yargs Sven Yargs k 30 30 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. FumbleFingers FumbleFingers k 45 45 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. I agree with the sentiment: "The oft-repeated explanation of red herrings being used to deflect hounds sounds a little fanciful to me".
If a convict did have access to some stinky fish, and managed to escape with some on their person, the smell of fish juice would be all over their hands and likely clothes; I'd just train my search hounds to FOLLOW the scent of the herring, which would still lead me to the convict on the run. In other words, that etymology smells downright fishy to me In his book, Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky says of New Englanders, They also ate a great deal of salted herring, though they seem to have preferred lightly salted and smoked red herring, perhaps because of their limited salt supply.
In Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation we have an early letter to the Settlers at New Plymouth from Robert Cushman of England, who says, We have now sent you, we hope, men and a means to accomplish three things, viz. Sometimes they aren't even subtle. Perhaps most blatantly, a character in the cartoon A Pup Named Scooby-Doo who was constantly being blamed for myriad crimes was named—you guessed it—Red Herring.
But where does this literary device come from, and why is it named after a fish? For a bit of background: herring are naturally a silvery hue, but they turn reddish-brown when they're smoked. Long before refrigerators were invented, this was done to preserve the fish for months at a time. They can also be pretty smelly. As Gizmodo's io9 blog points out, it was believed that red herring were dragged against the ground to help train hounds to sniff out prey in the 17th century.
Quaker guns logs used as ruses to imitate warfare cannons in former Confederate fortifications at Manassas Junction March It is a commonly used deception tactic during the 18th and 19th centuries. Still, it is widely accepted that Cobbett merely popularized the phrase, rather than being a progenitor.
Ironically, there is another, less accepted theory that might be the true origin of the red herring A rich clergyman from Oxford who went by the name of Jasper Mayne died in His will said that Mayne left a large sum of money in a coffer for the renovation of St. Wooden duck decoys. But one thing is certain, one or the other is a misleading clue in the quest to point out the amusing origin of the phrase.
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