Red Herrings by Aliza Brylinsky

Red herrings. They are a commonly used plot device in mystery novels, beloved among writers and readers alike for their defiance of normal expectations and their role in leading towards a false conclusion (at first, as many of them are quickly resolved). But where exactly did the term “red herring” come from? Can its origin within written text be definitively pointed to?

To understand where the concept of a red herring came from, we must first know its definition. A red herring is not in fact a kind of fish, as a person who does not commonly read mystery novels may guess, but is instead something within a narrative meant to mislead or distract the reader from an important question or conclusion. Red herrings can take many different forms within the broader context of a novel—some of them are viewed as fallacies, others as literary devices—but they are all intended to throw the audience off of the scent of whatever logical conclusion they might form to the problem or mystery at hand, leading to conclusions being drawn about the text that are unknowingly false.

It’s important to note that red herrings may or may not be used intentionally within a text. They aren’t necessarily always used with the outright intent to mislead an audience, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and fall into a wide category of what are known as ‘relevance’ fallacies—that is, the concept of two topics being related to each other in a way that makes it useful to consider the second topic when viewing the first. Red herrings are also often used in legal studies, to attempt to discern which students will become misled and distracted from reaching the correct conclusion about a certain case.

But where did the term “red herring” originate? Can we point to its first definite usage within a text or elsewhere? At first, there were rumors that the phrase originated due to the belief that red herrings were dragged across the ground to help hunting dogs train themselves to sniff out the correct scent that they were supposed to track during the 17th century. Then there was the idea that escaped prisoners would use herring to hide their scent from tracking dogs. Though both ideas are credible, the actual origin of the phrase “red herring” can be traced back as long ago as the early 1800s. Though the true year of publication is never specified, around this time the English journalist William Cobbett wrote a story telling how he had supposedly used the scent of a red herring as a young child to lure hunting hounds off of the scent of a hare. Though the piece was meant as a criticism directed towards his fellow journalists for allowing themselves to be misled by false information (specifically surrounding Napoleon’s defeat), the idiom caught on, and when the tale was republished in 1833 it quickly spread, worming its way into literature and pop culture alike.

For a less complicated explanation of red herrings, visit Cozy Cat Press’s YouTube channel, where a simple video about the phrase can be found. at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ff3GN-K7a4