The Saturday briefing

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

- by CAROLINE FORD

Is there anything you're yearning to know? Send your questions, on any subject, to the contacts given below, and we will do our best to answer them...

I've been watching reruns of Poirot and the phrase “red herring” keeps popping up and I wondered why we say that?

Joseph James, Cambridge

What is a good mystery or “whodunnit” without a sprinkling of red herrings? They are the silver darlings of crime writers, who use them to mislead or distract the reader and protagonist from the truth.

There’s no such fish species as a red herring, it’s a name given to a kipper that has turned a reddish colour during the curing process.

In this sense, it appears in the poem by Walter of Bibbesworth in the late 13th century: “He etep no ffyssh But heryng red.”

“Red herring” to mean a clue that deliberately deceives, comes from a method of training hunting dogs. A strong-smelling, smoked herring would be dragged across a trail to confuse the puppies and “throw them off the scent” they were meant to be following.

This meaning was popularised by radical William Cobbett in an 1807 article, in which he criticises accounts of Napoleon’s defeat, comparing the misleading reports to the use of the fish to confuse hounds. And in 1920s America, investment bankers started calling preliminary prospectuses “red herrings” as a warning to investors that the files were not complete or final and could be misleading.