The Lure of the Red Herring
Bernard Pyron
ron http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/herring.htm
A Red Herring is something that is deliberately set up to mislead or distract from a relevant or important issue. This is what I thought a Red Herring meant.. People set up Red Herrings in political debate, as in the 2016 election. A Red Herring can be some "dirt" claimed to be found out about an opposing political candidate, and the "dirt," or accusation of wrongdoing, is set up in an effort to take over the "narrative," which is the topic of argument between the two parties. The task of the opposition is to maneuver in a way to avoid simply going on the defense but instead couner-attacking in a way to force a new "narraitive" for argument, while showing that the accusation is a lie, and maintaning credibility and the moral high ground..
Red Herrings can also be used in areas of debate other than in politics. For example, followers of a set of false doctrines within Christianity can use Red Herrings to defend their theology. They might begin to claim that their theology is not as described by their opponents, which acts as a Red Herring if it becomes the topic of argument and causes confusion in the opposition about what that false set of doctrines really is, and what the true Gospel of Chist is.
But I found out that a Red Herring is an interesting use of metaphor. In England many of the country gentry had hounds that they ran after fox, but some people took the side of the foxes and wanted to stop the dogs from catching and killing the fox. Red Herrings are fish which are turned red from being smoked. Remember that fish have a strong smell. So, the people who wanted to protect the fox would go out and supposedly spread red Herrings on the trail of the fox the dogs were trailing to confuse the hounds. This would not be easy to do, since the smelly fish would either have to be spread over a wide area or the people spreading the fish would have to somehow get in the right position to deposit the smelly fish right on the trail of the fox.
Foxes and Hounds are faster than people, and rarely does the Fox or Coyote follow the exact same trail when he is circling. But its an interesting metaphor anyway. And it would have made the old "Wolf Hunters" of South Texas laugh to think of spreading smelly fish on the trail of a coyote to save it from the hounds, which rarely caught one. The South Texas "Wolf Hunters" would sit at their camp fires all night waiting for their trail hounds to jump a coyote "Wolf" on a hot trail, and spent much of that time talking about past great hunts, and a story about the Red Herring might have been welcomed by them. I have sat at their camp fires several times, the last time being right after Christmas in early 1961 in southwest Bexar county.
For anyone from that area who might see this, we camped at two different places that night. After not finding any hot coyote trails just north of Old Bexar. we drove south on Kinney (Kenney) Road and camped longer on that road not far north of the Atascosa county line. At that time Kinney Road was a narrow dirt road with almost no traffic on a Saturday night after ten. Uncle Casey Pyron, my older brother George Pyron, myself and Warren Healer, who had the pack of coyote hounds, were along on this hunt. About the only excitement I remmeber was that George was asleep beside the January camp fire and suddenly a coyote yelped up the road and George woke up and started running toward the coyote, but apparently Warren's hounds were too far away and none of them found the trail of that coyote.
http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/herring.htm..................."The Lure of the Red Herring.........."All the dictionaries and reference books I consulted argued that the metaphor grew up because a red herring was dragged along the ground to confuse a scent.
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, and many dictionaries, say that red herrings were used to confuse the hounds chasing a fox. 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? ........
All this points to a subtle kind of metaphoric meaning for the Red Herring.
"Robert Scott Ross and the OED now trace the figurative sense to the radical journalist William Cobbett, whose Weekly Political Register thundered in the years 1803-35 against the English political system he denigrated as the Old Corruption. 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. 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.”
Bernard Pyron
ron http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/herring.htm
A Red Herring is something that is deliberately set up to mislead or distract from a relevant or important issue. This is what I thought a Red Herring meant.. People set up Red Herrings in political debate, as in the 2016 election. A Red Herring can be some "dirt" claimed to be found out about an opposing political candidate, and the "dirt," or accusation of wrongdoing, is set up in an effort to take over the "narrative," which is the topic of argument between the two parties. The task of the opposition is to maneuver in a way to avoid simply going on the defense but instead couner-attacking in a way to force a new "narraitive" for argument, while showing that the accusation is a lie, and maintaning credibility and the moral high ground..
Red Herrings can also be used in areas of debate other than in politics. For example, followers of a set of false doctrines within Christianity can use Red Herrings to defend their theology. They might begin to claim that their theology is not as described by their opponents, which acts as a Red Herring if it becomes the topic of argument and causes confusion in the opposition about what that false set of doctrines really is, and what the true Gospel of Chist is.
But I found out that a Red Herring is an interesting use of metaphor. In England many of the country gentry had hounds that they ran after fox, but some people took the side of the foxes and wanted to stop the dogs from catching and killing the fox. Red Herrings are fish which are turned red from being smoked. Remember that fish have a strong smell. So, the people who wanted to protect the fox would go out and supposedly spread red Herrings on the trail of the fox the dogs were trailing to confuse the hounds. This would not be easy to do, since the smelly fish would either have to be spread over a wide area or the people spreading the fish would have to somehow get in the right position to deposit the smelly fish right on the trail of the fox.
Foxes and Hounds are faster than people, and rarely does the Fox or Coyote follow the exact same trail when he is circling. But its an interesting metaphor anyway. And it would have made the old "Wolf Hunters" of South Texas laugh to think of spreading smelly fish on the trail of a coyote to save it from the hounds, which rarely caught one. The South Texas "Wolf Hunters" would sit at their camp fires all night waiting for their trail hounds to jump a coyote "Wolf" on a hot trail, and spent much of that time talking about past great hunts, and a story about the Red Herring might have been welcomed by them. I have sat at their camp fires several times, the last time being right after Christmas in early 1961 in southwest Bexar county.
For anyone from that area who might see this, we camped at two different places that night. After not finding any hot coyote trails just north of Old Bexar. we drove south on Kinney (Kenney) Road and camped longer on that road not far north of the Atascosa county line. At that time Kinney Road was a narrow dirt road with almost no traffic on a Saturday night after ten. Uncle Casey Pyron, my older brother George Pyron, myself and Warren Healer, who had the pack of coyote hounds, were along on this hunt. About the only excitement I remmeber was that George was asleep beside the January camp fire and suddenly a coyote yelped up the road and George woke up and started running toward the coyote, but apparently Warren's hounds were too far away and none of them found the trail of that coyote.
http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/herring.htm..................."The Lure of the Red Herring.........."All the dictionaries and reference books I consulted argued that the metaphor grew up because a red herring was dragged along the ground to confuse a scent.
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, and many dictionaries, say that red herrings were used to confuse the hounds chasing a fox. 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? ........
All this points to a subtle kind of metaphoric meaning for the Red Herring.
"Robert Scott Ross and the OED now trace the figurative sense to the radical journalist William Cobbett, whose Weekly Political Register thundered in the years 1803-35 against the English political system he denigrated as the Old Corruption. 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. 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.”
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