Where do the expressions red herring, read the riot act, white elephant, and pay through the nose come from?
A red herring is a clue that ends up not being relevant to the crime, or purposefully set to distract the police. The main theory of its origin is that it came from training dogs to hunt, or training horses to follow a hunt. A herring is a type of fish, but none of them are naturally red. The color comes from the fish being smoked, which also gives it a very pungent odor. The phrase became used to refer to a distracting clue in 1807, when a journalist called William Cobbett used it about a newspaper that prematurely reported Napoleon’s defeat. However, the expression comes from a few hundred years before that. It was used in the early 18th century and appears to refer to a method of training dogs to follow a scent. A pungent red herring would be dragged along the path of the scent the dog was following to try and distract it. A fully trained dog would not be distracted. Other research shows that this was a mistake and the origin of the phrase was from horse training. The red herring would be dragged along the path the horse was following to get it used to following the chaos of a hunting party.
To read someone the riot act means to be very angry with them. The phrase comes from an actual British law, the Riot Act of 1714. The Riot Act was a law that banned any group of 12 or more people from assembling unlawfully and ordered them to disperse or face being arrested. If they refused to disperse, they were guilty of a felony and could be punished by death. The law was passed during a period of civil unrest and several riots. There was a lot of economic hardship owing to high food prices after several bad harvests and it was felt the government needed some way of limiting the protests. Before the Riot Act could be used, it had to be read to the people who were being accused. “Our sovereign lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons, being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the act made in the first year of King George, for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies. God save the King.” This was quite long and there were a lot of occasions where people didn’t know if they had been read the riot act or not, and it tended to be used for political purposes and was just a way of arresting people. Over time, “to read the riot act” became used in common speech as well.
These days, we use “a white elephant” for a gift that we don’t want and have no idea how to use. Something that takes up space and is generally useless. The expression comes from Siam, which is modern day Thailand. White elephants are very rare, and if one was found, it automatically became the property of the king. In Siam, elephants were used as work animals. A white elephant was sacred and could not be used for work. It had to be cared for and it was extremely expensive. The origin of a white elephant gift comes from a legend where the king of Siam would give people he didn’t like a white elephant as a gift because looking after it would often ruin them.
Pay through the nose means to pay a price that is too high for something. There are two theories as to where this expression came from, although there is no real evidence for either of them. The first theory is that the term comes from Old Norse, where peoples that they conquered were forced to pay a “nef-gildi”, which means nose tax. There was payment required for each nose in a village, and the punishment for non payment was to have the nose slit. The second theory is that the expression comes from ships. At the front of a ship were the hawseholes, also known as the ship’s nostrils, which were for the anchor chain. Paying out means to let out the anchor chain and it was a very hard job because the chain was extremely heavy. So, paying through the nose meant paying the anchor chain through the ship’s nose, which was a job nobody wanted to do. The nautical explanation is more accepted than the Norse tax explanation.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring
https://www.historyextra.com/period/georgian/why-we-say-phrase-red-herring-hunting-origins
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riot_Act
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/read_someone_the_riot_act
https://www.history.com/articles/white-elephant-exchange-origins
https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/why-do-we-say-white-elephant
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pay_through_the_nose
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