Did You Know?Believe it or not, red herring has as much to do with hunting dogs as with brightly colored fish. Here's how: A herring is a soft-finned bony fish. People who like to eat herring have long preserved them by salting and slowly smoking them.
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That process makes a herring turn red or dark brown - and gives them a very strong smell. Dogs love to sniff such smelly treats, a fact that makes the fish a perfect diversion for anyone trying to distract hunting dogs from the trail of their quarry. The practice of using preserved fish to confuse hunting dogs led to the use of the term red herring for anything that diverts attention from the issue at hand.
Definition of Red HerringA red herring in literature is a element that is used to throw off readers and lead them to false conclusions. This is an especially popular literary device to use in detective stories and thrillers. An author provides one or more red herrings intentionally to divert attention away from the true object or person of interest, thereby making the conclusion to the book more of a surprise. Red herring examples can come in the form of clues, people who seem suspicious, or other fallacious reasoning done by characters that leads the reader astray. Differences Between Red Herrings and Other FallaciesRed herrings are an example of an informal. While a formal contains a flaw in logic, an informal fallacy is an that often contains a flaw in reasoning.
An informal fallacy will often include irrelevant to persuade a reader or listener to believe a false conclusion. Thus, even if the evidence is true, and therefore the logic is sound, the reasoning that connects the evidence with the conclusion is faulty.In the real world, a red herring may be unintentional (for example, any evidence in a real detective case that later proves to be irrelevant). The definition of red herring when used in literature, however, is that it is intentional. ♦ Origin of Red HerringThere is some debate about where this idiomatic term first originated. The first known usage of the phrase was in the mid-13 th century, when an Anglo-Norman poet wrote the line “He etep no ffyssh But heryng red.” As there is no such fish called a red herring, the poet here was referring to a strongly cured or heavily smoked kipper fish.Some have argued that the current meaning of the phrase dates back to dog training practices, in which a hunter would use strongly smelling red herrings to teach puppies to follow a scent.
The argument continues that as the dog grew older hunters would continue to use red herrings to try and fool the dog and improve their ability to identify weaker scents left by real targets such as a hare or a fox. Thus, the smell of the red herring was ultimately supposed to to lead a poorly trained dog astray.While this is a plausible story, it is possible that there was never any such practice, especially in widespread use. In 1807, a journalist named William Cobbett criticized the English press for reporting Napoleon’s defeat prematurely. He wrote that he once had used red herrings to deflect hounds from a scent, and compared the press coverage to a “political red-herring.” Apparently, this was enough to convince readers that it was an actual hunting practice. Regardless of the origin, the term stuck, and is now widely known as a literary device and a rhetorical strategy. Examples of Red Herring from Literature Example #1In Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code, a character named Bishop Aringarosa seems to be a central part of the conspiracy at the core of the plot.
Later in the book the reader finds out that the bishop had been fooled by the real villain. Dan Brown was quite intentional with this red herring—the character’s name is an Italian translation of the term ( aringa means “herring” and rosa means “red”). Example #2Four little Indian boys going out to sea;A red herring swallowed one and then there were three.( And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie)Agatha Christie was a master at the detective novel, and almost all of her plots contain some examples of red herring. And Then There Were None is her most famous work, and has sold more than 100 million copies since its publication in 1939. It revolves around ten people who are invited to an uninhabited island off the coast of England. When they arrive they find a copy of the folk poem “Ten Little Indians.” One by one, they begin to die in ways that parallel the poem (the first person to die has a glass of wine that contains potassium cyanide, mimicking the first line of the poem: “one choked his little self and then there were nine”). When there are only four people left on the island, one goes missing and the remaining three assume that he must be the killer.
Instead, they later find his body washed up onshore. Therefore, his absence was a red herring that misled the characters and, presumably, the reader.
Indeed, this parallels the line of the poem about a red herring swallowing the fourth-to-last boy. Example #3The plot of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens features a major red herring.
The main character, Pip, discovers that he has a wealthy benefactor. Both he and the reader assume that it must be Miss Havisham, the elderly eccentric woman who seems to have taken him in. We learn later than Miss Havisham has only recruited Pip as a means of taking revenge on the man who left her at the altar; Pip’s benefactor is actually an escaped convict whom Pip briefly helped when he was a young boy.
Example #4One famous red herring example comes from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Final Problem. As Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are taking a walk through the mountains of Switzerland, Dr.
Watson receives a message that an Englishwoman back at their hotel is in urgent need of care and prefers to see an English doctor. Watson races back to the hotel, only to find that there is no Englishwoman. The message had been a red herring sent by the notorious villain Professor James Moriarty. He sent the message to isolate Sherlock Holmes, and when Dr.
Watson returns to the mountains he finds evidence of a struggle between the two men leading over the edge of a cliff.