"Communism was just a red herring"

[Bricker]

All three endings to the movie Clue include this line during the exposé. The solution to the murders had nothing to do with communism, although clues pointing towards it appeared earlier. So we say that the issue was a “red herring,” a false lead away from the actual solution.

Why “red herring”? Are they renowned in the fish world for their poor sense of direction or inability to properly focus on important issues? Are other colors of herrings more savvy? Why in the world has the phrase “red herring” come to mean what it does?

[Garfield226]

@The Word Detective

The only practical way to preserve herring is to cure them with a combination of salting and smoking, and those herring most heavily cured turn a deep crimson color from the process. Voila, red herring.

Curing herring in this fashion not only preserves the fish and changes its color, but also gives it a distinctive smell, and thereby hangs the modern meaning of “red herring.” In training hounds to hunt foxes, these red herrings, dragged on a string through the woods, were used to lay down a trail of scent for the dogs to follow. There is also some evidence that red herrings were, later in the training process, sometimes dragged across the scent trail of a real fox to test the ability of the hounds to ignore a false clue and stick to the scent of the fox.

http://www.word-detective.com/042601.html

Interesting. I’d never really thought about it before.

[evilbeth]

The most common thought is that red herrings (which were heavily salted and smoked for a very long time) had such a strong smell that they were used to distract dogs from a fox’s scent during a fox hunt or training for such sport–either by trainers wanting to sharpen the dogs’ tracking sense or by others deliberately trying to distract the dogs from the trail of the fox.

The OED lists the first written usage in this context as being in 1686. It lists the first metaphorical usage of the phrase as something that distracts from the true purpose in 1884.

[evilbeth]

Of course, I tried to post this three times before I got it to go through and then I was too late!