The deceptive origin of the red herring
We use the term 'red herring' to describe a clever distraction, but the popular story of using pungent, smoked fish to mislead hunting hounds is likely a myth. The true history of this phrase reveals how a single journalist's anecdote permanently reshaped our language.
In logic and literature, a red herring is a diversionary tactic designed to lead an audience toward a false conclusion. It can be an intentional literary device, such as the character Bishop Aringarosa in Dan Brown's *The Daument Code*, or an unintentional logical fallacy where an irrelevant point is used to dodge a relevant argument. In legal studies, professors even use red herrings as exam problems to test a student's ability to discern material facts from distractions.
The phrase's figurative meaning is widely attributed to a training technique for scent hounds, where a strong-smelling, heavily salted, and smoked herring is dragged across a trail to confuse dogs. However, research by Professor Gerald Cohen and Robert Scott Ross suggests this origin is a misunderstanding. They found that the earliest recorded use of herring for training involved Gerland Langbaine’s 1697 tract on horsemanship, which suggested using a carcass to habituate horses to the chaos of a hunt, using a red herring only as a substitute.
The modern idiom actually stems from the English polemicist William Cobbett. In his February 14, 1807, periodical *Political Register*, Cobbett recounted a personal story of using a smoked herring to divert hounds from a rabbit. While the literal 'red herring'—a pungent, reddish-fleshed kipper—has been documented since at least the 13th century, Cobbett's 1807 anecdote was powerful enough to cement the false idea of the fish as a deliberate hunting distraction in the public consciousness.
Source: Red herring
