As We Say It

"The detective found a wallet at the crime scene, but it turned out to be a red herring — it belonged to the postman." We use "red herring" to mean a false clue, a distraction, a piece of information that leads you confidently in the wrong direction. Mystery writers love them. Politicians deploy them. Your mother-in-law uses them to change the subject when you ask about Christmas plans.

The phrase feels so literary, so perfectly suited to the world of whodunnits and courtroom dramas, that most people assume it originated there. It didn't. The real story is stranger, smellier, and considerably more political.

The Wrong Version

The traditional explanation — the one you'll find in dozens of books and approximately ten thousand websites — goes like this: in fox hunting, trainers would drag a smoked, pungent red herring (a kipper, essentially) across the ground to teach young hounds to follow a scent trail. Later, hunt saboteurs would drag red herrings across the fox's path to confuse the dogs and throw them off the scent. Hence the metaphor: a red herring is something that diverts you from the true trail.

It's a lovely story. Vivid, logical, and pleasingly rural. The problem is that the hunting-saboteur version has no solid historical evidence behind it. As etymologist Michael Quinion and others have demonstrated, there are no recorded accounts of hunt saboteurs using herring in this way before the phrase entered the language. The saboteur story appears to be — deliciously — a red herring about red herrings.

The Real Story

The man who gave us "red herring" in its modern metaphorical sense was almost certainly William Cobbett, the radical English journalist, farmer, and all-round troublemaker. In 1807, Cobbett published a story in his Political Register that would embed the phrase in the English language forever.

Cobbett described an incident from his boyhood. As a young man, he claimed, he had used a smoked red herring to divert a pack of hounds from chasing a hare. He dragged the pungent fish across the hare's trail, and the dogs — overwhelmed by the stronger scent — abandoned their quarry and followed the herring instead.

But here's the twist: Cobbett wasn't telling this story because he cared about hounds or hares. He was making a political point. His real target was the British press, which he accused of being distracted from important political issues by trivial sensations — the journalistic equivalent of chasing a smoked fish instead of the real prey. The red herring was his metaphor for media misdirection.

In a follow-up piece in 1833, Cobbett made the metaphor even more explicit, writing about how the press had been drawn away from genuine political scandals by "a red herring" of irrelevant controversy. The phrase caught fire. Political commentators adopted it. Within a generation, "red herring" had crossed from Cobbett's columns into general usage.

Now, whether Cobbett's boyhood story was true is another matter entirely. He was a brilliant polemicist but not always a reliable narrator of his own life. What matters is that his metaphor worked — so perfectly, in fact, that it survived the man and his politics entirely. Within decades, the political context was forgotten, and "red herring" had become a universal expression for any kind of misdirection.

The mystery-fiction meaning came later. It wasn't until the golden age of detective novels in the 1920s and 1930s — Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and their peers — that "red herring" became specifically associated with false clues planted in a plot to mislead the reader. By then, the phrase had been doing general-purpose misdirection work for over a century.

As for the fish itself: a "red herring" is simply a herring that has been heavily smoked and salted, a process that turns its flesh a deep reddish-brown. Kippers, in other words. They were a common, cheap source of protein in England for centuries, and their powerful smell was a matter of established fact long before anyone thought to use them as a metaphor. Whether anyone ever actually dragged one across a fox's trail remains, appropriately enough, unproven.