It's February and we're awash in red — roses, hearts, ink (darn those holiday purchases). Also, herrings.
Red herrings have been popping up left and right. There's the new restaurant in Clarendon Hills (spelled Redd Herring). There's the new book by Susan Engel, "Red Flags or Red Herrings? Predicting Who Your Child Will Become" (Atria Books). And there's the term's ever-present use in political discourse. (Recently attached to the debate surrounding the Tucson, Ariz., shootings — did heated rhetoric played a role in the tragedy, or is that a red herring?)
A red herring refers to something that distracts from the real issue at hand. "A detail or remark inserted into a discussion, either intentionally or unintentionally, that sidetracks the discussion," writes Robert J. Gula in "Nonsense: Red Herrings, Straw Men and Sacred Cows: How We Abuse Logic in Our Everyday Language" (Axios Press). "The red herring is invariably irrelevant and is often emotionally charged. The participants in the discussion go after the red herring and forget what they were initially talking about; in fact, they may never get back to their original topic."
So how did a smoked fish come to represent such a state of affairs?
Merriam-Webster's dictionary credits "the practice of drawing a red herring across a trail to confuse hunting dogs." This is the widely accepted origin according to a quick search of various sources.
But Michael Quinion, author of "Why is Q Always Followed by U?" (Particular Books) and the man behind World Wide Words language blog (worldwidewords.org), wasn't having it.
"A study of the entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, coupled with a little knowledge of fox hunting and some reading around the topic, made me wonder if the usual story about its origin was correct," Quinion wrote on his site back in 2008. "What is left unsaid is any clue to who was supposed to be laying this false trail, or why. Was an early group of hunt saboteurs at work?"
Imagine his joy when a pair of articles in the October 2008 edition of Comments on Etymology, a newsletter edited by the American Dialect Society's Gerald Cohen, tackled this very topic. ("I am a long-standing subscriber," Quinion told us when we tracked him down this week.)
The articles traced red herring's origins to William Cobbett, a British journalist in the early 1800s. "He wrote a story, presumably fictional, in the issue of 14 February 1807 about how as a boy he had used a red herring as a decoy to deflect hounds chasing after a hare," Quinion wrote. "He used the story as a metaphor to decry the press, which had allowed itself to be misled by false information about a supposed defeat of Napoleon; this caused them to take their attention off important domestic matters. 'It was a mere transitory effect of the political red-herring; for, on the Saturday, the scent became as cold as a stone.'
"This story, and his extended repetition of it in 1833, was enough to get the figurative sense of red herring into the minds of his readers," Quinion wrote, "unfortunately also with the false idea that it came from some real practice of huntsmen."
Quinion says the Oxford English Dictionary has since revised its red herring entry, with the 2010 version referencing Cobbett's contribution to the metaphor's conception.
We're going to be honest here. We know that hounds, fish and throwing things off-scent all appear to play a role in red herring's etymology, but beyond that we're a little murky.
Still, we're confident that we know the meaning of the phrase. And we're confident that we don't want herring — red or otherwise — for Valentine's dinner.