"...a pair of articles in the October 2008 edition of Comments on Etymology, a newsletter edited by the American Dialect Society's Gerald Cohen, tackled this very topic. ("I am a long-standing subscriber," Quinion told us when we tracked him down this week.) The articles traced red herring's origins to William Cobbett, a British journalist in the early 1800s. "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," Quinion wrote. "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.'"